In addition to these Mr F. Kidson has also published a set of Country and Morris dance tunes, but without instructions as to the dances.
Although this list gives a very fair idea of the traditional Morris dances still lingering in country places, two things must be borne in mind—first, that many of these dances with different names are practically the same dances; another tune and a very slight alteration in the step is quite enough for a Morris dancer to say he has another dance to show; and secondly, that the collectors have not yet finished their work. I have in my possession quite a long list of people and places as yet unvisited which may yield dances yet unrecorded, and Mr Cecil Sharp has announced many dances and variants collected but not published.
The Folk-dance has been found in the following counties:—
Gloucestershire. Monmouthshire. Oxfordshire. Yorkshire. Berkshire. Lancashire. Northamptonshire. Cheshire. Lincolnshire. Northumberland. Derbyshire. Warwickshire. Nottinghamshire. Worcestershire. Sussex. Surrey. Cornwall.
A word must be said about the tunes played for the dances by country musicians to-day.
These tunes are, of course, of much later date than the Morris and Sword dances, and probably contemporary with the original country dances. The musicians took any tune which was popular at the time and adapted it to the dances, so that the tunes are not by any means all traditional. As an instance of this, I remember that old Mr Trafford, of Headington, told me that one day when he heard a military band playing, he went and listened at the door of the barracks, and that he was so attracted by the tune that he at once hummed it to the Morris dance fiddler and adapted it to a Morris dance. To this day he likes the tune, which he calls “Buffalo Gals,”[5] so much that he wanted Mr Carey to take it down and use it. There is no doubt that at any given time the musicians used to adapt to the dances any popular tune that took their fancy, and I think that probably the name of the dance was altered to fit the tune. Anyway the tune which Mr Trafford liked, called “The Buffalo Girls,” had certainly been taken for the name of a dance. The only dance tune that I have been able to discover which has its dance steps attached to it is the one before mentioned in Arbeau’s book. There is no doubt either that the nature of the tunes changed considerably as the whittle and dub went out of fashion and were superseded by the fiddle and later by the concertina, from which latter instrument the first revived tunes were taken by Mr Sharp from William Kimber. The tunes taken from the violin were more likely to be played in a modal scale; for instance, Kimber played “The Rigs of Marlow” in the modern scale, but Mark Cox, who gave it to us from the fiddle, played it in a modal form.