Solstice

Thomas Hardy has a great description of what distinguishes unbroken folk traditions from revivals:

A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction.

Personally, I draw a different distinction. I find that revivals have some kind of logic to them. My old Morris team used to tell the audience, “The sticks represent the spirits of the earth, the handkerchiefs represent the spirits of the air, and the bells represent the spirits of the other world.” It made a good spiel, but it's way too tidy to be true. We have no idea why Morris dancers started using those particular things. People add stuff they like, and eventually you get a hodgepodge of things that no one remembers the origins of.

Today I saw the summer solstice festivities in Otavalo, Ecuador, also known as San Juan or Inti Raymi. The solstice doesn't mean a lot at the equator – the day and night are each 12 hours every day of the year – but they surely do celebrate it anyway. It began this morning when a bunch of folks in rainbow masks carried a figure of John the Baptist into church, and it's still going strong. In between there have been parades, a bouncy castle, and a lot of corn products. Currently folks are having a city-wide street party playing music and dancing in circles. A gang of teenagers playing melodicas, flutes, and guitars just jogged by my window. Sorry, Mr. Hardy, but these people appear to be having a blast.



Watching a folk tradition that was totally new to me, my mind was full of questions:
Why are those guys dressed in drag?
Why are conch shells a traditional instrument so far from the sea?
How come there aren't any female musicians?
Why are there tentacles on your hat?

If Ecuadoran folk tradition is anything like the ones I know, the answer is probably, “Um, I'm not sure.” Which makes perfect sense.

Why do we love British songs?

Maple Morris gathered in Boston this weekend. Which meant a lot of dancing and a lot of singing. One staple of a Maple weekend is always a jaunty version of “Cornish Lads”:

Cornish lads are fishermen
And Cornish lads are miners too
But when the fish and tin are gone
What are the Cornish boys to do?

Another favorite is “Torn Screen Door”, about the loss of small farms:

They worked their fingers to the bone 
Nothing left they can call their own 
Packed it in under leaden skies 
With just the wheat waving them goodbye

Had a life that they tried to save 
But the banks took it all away 
Hung a sign on a torn screen door:
'Nobody lives here no more.'

It always strikes me as odd that a bunch of young urban Americans and Canadians, nearly all with degrees from expensive colleges, should get together to sing these particular songs. What makes a law student or a business consultant stay up all night singing about the poor economy in Cornwall or rural Ontario?

Sometimes I think it doesn't matter what the songs are about, and we would sing anything as long as it had a chorus with room for a couple of harmony parts. Morris is a hedonistic experience, with hard physical exertion all day and drinking and singing late into the night. There's a lot of hugging, a lot of enjoyment in being around people we love that we don't see often. Harmony singing is the sound of community. And some of it is just really excellent music (seriously, follow that link to “Torn Screen Door”).

But I also think it's because our real lives don't allow for much sentiment. Young urban people embrace irony. It's not cool to take anything too seriously. There is no song about our real lives, about the high cost of apartments in Boston or having to grade biology exams all weekend. The closest I can think of are parodies like White Collar Holler.

But the difficulties of rural life a century earlier, preferably on another continent? Those we can sing about, arms draped around each other.

Of course, the US has a genre about rural life, and about the love of friends and home: country music. When Stephan sang a country ode to

A little bit of chicken fried 
Cold beer on a Friday night

we listened with laughter, despite the fact that it was indeed sung on a Friday night, cold beer in hand. The real hilarity started with the last verse, apparently mandatory in country songs, thanking God for the Stars and Stripes. (To be fair, it was a really terrible verse, especially the line indicating that veterans must die to defend our right to fried foods.) And yet we can sing “Rule Britannia” with something approaching a straight face. Nobody really thinks we love the British navy, but a song that people in our own country take seriously has to be distanced with laughter.

I don't mind the irony, though, if it's a way we can get close to each other.

What's working, part 2: the Morris team

This is part 2 of a series on things that are going well in my life. Maybe you'll read it and think, yikes, that would never work for me. But maybe it will give you a jumping-off point.

I'm a member of a women's folk dance team, Muddy River Morris. We do traditional dances from the Cotswold region of England, as well as a lot of dances we made up in that style.



I love the pattern Morris it gives to the year: October is time for the apple orchard tour. April is New England Folk Festival time. May Day is for dancing at dawn by the banks of the Charles, and later in the month there's the Marlboro Ale in Vermont, a weekend of dancing throughout the countryside all day and drinking and singing all night. After each of these, there's usually a feast. The week is also patterned: Tuesday is Muddy practice night, followed by a trip to the bar.

We have women from their late teens through their early 60s (though mostly bi-generational, with a lot of 20-somethings and 50-somethings.) We have married, single, widowed, and divorced women. We have sets of mothers and daughters, ex-girlfriends, sisters, and sisters-in-law. We've seen each other through dissertations, deaths, births, adoptions, and the occasional goth stage.



I don't like the ways sports and political identities get antagonistic. Group identity can easily become us vs. them, which is not something I enjoy. With Muddy River, there's a solid feeling of us, and we don't really need a them. People wear purple shirts to practice because it's our team color. They get really excited to choose the theme for the team skit at Marlboro (last year: gnomes). There are Muddy River cocktail parties and potlucks. We show up to each other's concerts, plays, and weddings.

I love having a women's space. I think women feel freer to argue, drink, yell, belch, and talk in a women's space. I love that the older women started in an age when Morris was for men, and they've carried us through into a time when women's teams are normal. (Inasmuch as Morris is ever "normal.")

I like being in a community that's been chugging along since 1975. I like looking around and expecting to still be dancing with some of these women in another few decades.

Stumbling

One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Cherry Tree Carol, based on a story from an apocryphal gospel. Joseph and the pregnant Mary are walking through an orchard. She, maybe because of the pregnancy, gets a yen for the cherries and asks him to pick her some. Joseph, none too pleased with the mysterious pregnancy situation, answers,

"Let him pick berries and let him pick cherries
That brought thee now with child."

It's such a typical interaction. Joseph and Mary are both feeling wronged. He's mad because someone knocked up his fiancée, and she's mad because she wants those cherries and can't go clambering around to get them. Plus she's just been insulted.

But because this is a story, a miracle happens and settles the argument. Unborn Jesus takes sides and tells the trees what to do.

Then bowed down the tallest tree
Into sweet Mary's hand.
Then Mary cried, "Oh, see now, Joseph!
I've cherries at command."

Mary is vindicated. Joseph, embarrassed, attempts an apology:

O, then bespoke old Joseph,
"I have done Mary wrong,
Cheer up, cheer up, my dearest dear,
And do not be cast down."

Arguments in real life don't work like this, but we wish they would. I often see this in social work clients (and myself): we act like if we can just prove how wronged we are, someone will take notice and rectify the situation. We would like the universe to announce: "You are right, and he is wrong." And we make up stories where it really does happen.

But in real life, there are no trees that bow down to settle arguments. The other person's hurt is as real as our own. There will not be a divine arbitration, so we have to patch things up as best we can.

And the carol echoes this: after the miracle, life goes on as usual.

So Mary picked one cherry,
As red as any blood,
And Mary and Joseph, they walked on homeward,
All with their heavy load.

I find this the most touching, most human part of a very human carol. We are all carrying heavy loads. We are all stumbling along in the dark, groping towards each other.