Anecdotes wanted

I need your help in collecting stories of impromptu ceilidhs and singsongs, please - when and where, how they happened, and how people felt about them. Anything from your own experience, and anything you've heard or read.

Or have you experienced opposition to making music: people too embarrassed to join in, or annoyed by the noise?

If you can give dates and places, even better.

Please comment.

Decline or Not?

Social music-making: the kind of music that happens on the coach home, round a bonfire, at a party, in a pub, or even at work. People making music together, not for performance, not to be heard, but to share the sound and the feel of a blend of harmony and rhythm in their bodies, with that extra something which comes of making it yourself, of being a productive part of the group.

It seems to be accepted that it happens in other parts of the world, but rarely in England; maybe in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales - but not England. It is also accepted that it used to be common. Pepys records family music-making in the evenings, and we have mention of pre-twentieth century music round the piano or the fiddle (depending on social and financial status), of sailors singing while they hauled and women singing round the well, of music in the fields at harvest; there are notes of early twentieth-century singsongs in pubs and charabancs.

This is the picture of the glory and the demise of English social music-making. Is it true? Did almost everyone sing and play music as a natural and intrinsic part of convivial gatherings and in their daily work, or are we perpetuating romanticised and idealised images made popular by folk-music collectors? Has it really changed? Does music no longer happen, and people prefer to listen rather than take part?

Baring-Gould, Barry, Beechey, Burke

Baring-Gould. Old Country Life
p185 Country Dances
in 1598 Hentzner described the English as "excelling in dancing, and in the art of music"

Jonathan Barry. Popular Culture in Seventeenth-century Bristol
ch 2 in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-century England
NEEDS PAGE
no assemblies or concerts until C18
music chiefly heard in the churches, alehouses, and streets
city waits


Beechey, Winifred. 1984. The Rich Mrs Robinson. Futura
account of childhood in small town in 20s and 30s
p9
Prayers and evening hymn
p39
songs which we sang together when we went out to tea with her[mother]. Somw of the songs I thought so silly that I could hardly bring myself to sing the words
Yellow daff-o-dilly - "even worse"
p77-78
scouts visiting in summer... marched down the high Street preceded by a fife band...
"We are some of the East Ham boys"
p118
In the evenings when the children were in bed... our mother played some songs, which we all sang - strange, inappropriate songs they seeemed to me, from a book aour father ahd dug up from somewhere: Jolly young Jacks are we; Merry of heart and gay; Sons of the rolling sea..."

Peter Burke
Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe 1978,1994
p ?
C18 England winessed a commercialisation of leisure; more formally-organised entertainments
p ?
[interesting but not relevant?]
1500 - popular culture was everyone's culture - a second culture for the educated, and the only culture for everyone else
by 1800 in most parts of Europe the educated, professional, and nobility had "abandoned popular culture to the lower classes from whom they were now separated... by profound differences in world view"
clergy because of the Reformations - reformers demanded a learned clergy [cf Baring-Gould]
"the old-style priest who wore a mask and danced in church at festivals... replaced by one... considerably more remote from his flock"
p?
nobles and bourgeoisie, Renaissance - modelled on couresy books (Castiglione etc)
upper classes speaking different language -English replaced Welsh and Gaelic [but C11-13 Norman French!]
p?
in England the change came during the reign of Elizabeth I. as the gap widened, "educated men began to see popular songs, beliefs, and festivals as exotic, quaint, fascinating, worthy of collection and record"
p?
in Elizabethan time, artificial was praise - meant educated, composed
late C18 there was revulsion against the artifice [Rousseau]
huge bibliography

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