Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: It’s May Day, so it’s a good day to pull Morris On off the shelves and put it on the turntable. The record dates from 1972, after Ashley Hutchings had left Steeleye Span, just before he started the Albion Band, and he got Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield to help him out.

(Photo by Keith Morris (no relation) via Wikipedia)

Shirley Collins, then married to Hutchings, adds vocals on a couple of tracks, under her married name, and the Chingford Morris is heard slapping their sticks on a couple of tracks. The result is a bit of a cult record these days, I think.

And of course, May Day is deeply associated with the Morris, certainly if the historian Peter Linebaugh is to be believed, and wasn’t one of those “traditions” invented in the 19th century:

Everywhere people "went a-Maying" by going into the woods and bringing back leaf, bough, and blossom to decorate their persons, homes, and loved ones with green garlands... Maypoles were erected. Dances were danced. Music was played. Drinks were drunk, and love was made. Winter was over, spring had sprung.

When I first heard Morris On, it changed my ideas about the Morris. I’d thought the music anaemic, but these are muscular arrangements; I’d thought the words fey, but some of these are full of smut and innuendo. The Nutting Song is not about gathering nuts. The Scots’ song Cuckoo’s Nest is not about collecting eggs.

Knowing more now about the history of all of this than I did then, I realise that I had heard the versions of Morris songs collected by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, then bowdlerised by Cecil Sharp before being popularised.

So, if nothing else, huge credit is due to Ashley Hutchings for excavating the then unfashionable music from under the long and dead hand of the early EFDSS.

Because, going back to Peter Linebaugh, the Morris and the dances are associated with what he calls “Green May Day”, the May Day of abundance, of the fields and forests, of the commons, of fertility, that used to overturn the order of things, at least for a day. All of which would have made the socially conservative Cecil Sharp deeply uncomfortable.  Staines Morris, on the record, is specifically about the May Day holiday:

Morris On is a real celebration of the music. The musicians are clearly having a good time as well. You can hear it in the playing and in the false start on Princess Royal that has been carefully left on the record by John Wood, the engineer and producer, who has featured on Salut! Live before. The record is, deliberately, a bit rough around the edges—it’s artfully artless.

And it turned out to be a successful format—there is a whole set of sequels, from Son of Morris On, through to Great Grandson of Morris On, as well as Morris on the Road.

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