Folk Dancers

Forty years ago a sharp-nosed, ascetic British antiquarian named Cecil Sharp noted that in certain remote parts of England, primitive villagers dressed themselves in strange costumes and skittered through peculiar dance steps unknown to most civilized Britishers. Poking sharply about among the archives of the British Museum, he discovered that many of these dance steps were as old as all get-out, some of them pre-Christian. Sharp de cided that the archaic struts & stomps of Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland should be revived. With this in mind, he founded the English Folk-Dance Society in 1911. Periodically the society's members would get together for a hop, skip and a jump, trick themselves out in peasant costume and practice morris and sword dancing.

At first these capers went comparatively unnoticed, though one Cockney butler, after witnessing a performance of Sharp's dancers on his master's premises, remarked: "Thank God we've got a navy." But such old-world dances as "Shepherds' Hey," "Lumps of Plum Pudding," "Bonnets so Blue," "The Merry, Merry Milkmaids" and "Picking up Sticks" fascinated England's more esthetic youths and maidens. In 1915 Sharp went to the U. S. and himself founded the English Folk-Dance Society's Manhattan branch. U. S. dancers, who had not yet forgotten their Virginia reels and square dances, proved as apt as their English colleagues. Today, the society's hopping and hey-nonnying is systematically carried on in more than ten U. S. cities, and in dozens of U. S. colleges and schools.

When Founder Cecil Sharp died in 1924, the leadership of the English Folk-Dance Society passed to a big-eared London biologist named Douglas Kennedy. So absorbed in folk dancing did Biologist Kennedy become that he gave up biology. Today he is regarded as No. i antiquarian jitterbug. Last week at Manhattan's New School for Social Research the cream of U. S. folk dancers gathered to welcome him to the U. S., and to strut a few steps with him. Clad in white trousers or long green shifts, the U. S. youths and maidens performed such classic items as Gathering Peascods and The Old Mole.

Also present was John Powell, U. S. composer and folk pundit, with a brace of hillbilly musicians. While the panting peascodders rested, "Uncle Jim" Chisholm, of Albemarle County, Va., played crusty mountain tunes on the fiddle, and lean, grey-haired Horton Barker sang frittery ballads through his nose. For a while it looked as though Ballad Singer Barker's more ribald offerings might stop the show. But they shushed him and cleared the atmosphere by dancing Flowers of Edinburgh.

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