Deborah Kermode Cumbrian Tune Sessions, Stan Laurel Pub Ulverston, Cumbria, England November 1999
By the time I had got to this interview, I was painfully aware of how much I'd drunk. Luckily Deborah took the ball and ran!
I cant remember your name! Deborah, Deborah Kermode. And did you grow up here? Yes, I grew up in Barrow-In-Furness and moved to Ulverston when I got married which was all of 8 to 10 miles away. And you're playing keyboard here, right? Yes, I've only taken to it less than a year ago, a member of a chili band in Ulverston, we travel around and play the Lakeland music. You're not the same ceili band as Mike Willoughby's. No, no. There's several different Ceili Bands in the area. So do they have ceili dances here? Oh absolutely, yeh. The word chili's not a local word; it's a Celtic word obviously, but we use it because people know what it means. Basically we do Cumbrian dances, not Celtic dances. I was thinking, we do contra dances, do you know anything about our contra dances? I guess people have local dances and they're all different. The local dances almost died out. I've been researching them for about 5 or 6 years. Along with the Lakeland step dancing and I've collected together... There's actually step dancing here... Oh quite defiantly. The step dancing died out as well, but several people have done research into it, in order for us to be able to gather together a whole range of steps, almost all done to the hornpipe, the local hornpipe which is a flat hornpipe, an undotted hornpipe, played fast, and the stepping is very high, leaping, a lot of hills and valleys in it, in keeping with the Lakeland area really. And.. That's cute. And quite distinctive. I haven't met done in this way anywhere else in the country and the interesting thing about Lakeland stepping is that it was part of the social scene. An awful lot of the social dances are built around the stepping that you would dance a step and do a 3 reel with 2 of the partners, usually the man in the middle, and you would each sort of vie to dance a better step than the other partners and gradually...I mean it was the break dancing of the day. So basically you're talking about 2 women... 2 women dancing with the man in the middle. That sounds like it would be good for our contra dances because we have so many women. Yeh, it is good, and the man usually tries to beat the women and do much better steps than them. A certain amount of competitiveness in the dancing. But that...to a certain extent that has died out. What used to be many years ago for about 200 years, going back to before the 1800s, right up until 1935 is the last record we have. But there were people still dancing the 3 reel with stepping in it up until the 1960s. And then it did all gradually...and then the last people to actually do it as part of their social scene all probably died between 1960 and 1990. But it is being revived by groups like Mike Willoughby and the ceili band I belong to. Now I had once had an interview with Martin Carthy [maybe Swarbrick] who told me...he told me there's no English fiddle style and I'd gotten an impression that there was no real continuous musical tradition in England...there must be up here, but there seems to be a break in it. There's a break...probably the big break I would say was at the end of the first World War. That was when it stopped being a major part of everybody's social life. Before then, every major village had children stepping it, every village. And the dancing was on every night of the week. And they were dancing their own local dances. Up until about 1929 or 25, plus the lances, the lances was part of it. The lancers? Yeh, I suppose you could say the lances are quadrilles and the Irish set dances derive from the quadrilles as well. In this country the quadrilles remained as quadrilles. They weren't married to the Irish music. They were married to Cumbrian music and they were danced as they came across from France. And that lasted about 200 years along side the local dances. It's quite interesting really. That lasted up to 1925, 1935 in some pockets, some rural pockets, and then it just seemed to die away, and jazz took it over. Its like "popular" music took it over. That WAS the popular music of the day. But after 200 years there was a whole generation that only wanted jazz and syncopation and ragtime. I mean, great, lovely music, every bit of it, it seemed to kill the dancing as well. And the stepping and the music. It just got put to one side. Well, now it is getting revived again. There are people who we play to, it seems to strike a chord, to strike an echo to them. They don't remember the tunes, but it strikes an echo with them. Its wonderful to hear the Lakeland tunes springing to life again. Some of the tunes we found, my husband and myself, in our research, they date back to 1917, 18, 19, and we've found quite a group of tunes that date back to one of the other dancing masters at the very very beginning of the 19th century, a James Wishman of Humberside. And the tunes have so much life in them, the dance tunes have so much life in them. Some of them the names are absolutely incredible..."Slip It In Easy," "A Touch Under the Blanket,"[unintell.]...that got a laugh didn't it? There's some brilliant...honestly! The great thing is that one of the teachers that we know of, one of the dance masters, they used to teach the landed gentry in Ambleside, he was definitely the cultured [unintell]..he used to teach the children how to dance. And he was striving for elegance. Can you give me a year on this? Yeh, this would be about 1811. OK. And he was teaching these, and at the same time he was going out at night and playing tunes like "Slip It In Easy" and "Touch Under the Blanket." But he never told the names to the landed gentry. But all the dance masters had bands. They called them quadrille bands or later on string bands. But at that time it was quadrille bands. At that time they played more than just quadrilles, you know, they played a tremendous amount of other stuff. And then when the polka came in in 1843, What? The polka came to Cumbria in 1843 and the music just went bvvuucchh!!! through the roof. It was wonderful. Now do you know anything about...is there an extent, is there an area where the music you would hear here in this area would extend? Well, I can tell you the connections. There are slight Irish connections, because the itinerant Irish workers came over to work the fields at hay time and they of course would bring their instruments over with them. There would be a lot of cross-pollination of tunes. There's a tremendous Scottish influence in Cumbria, especially in the bit that used to be Cumberland because the border of Scotland used to come down to the River L-- at one point anyway. So Scotland kind of like has moved up and down a lot over the years, so there's a tremendous Scottish influence in the tunes. But there are also some tunes which are just uniquely Lakeland. And they are really strange some of them, you don't know where they come from, they take a lot of getting used to, but when you get used to them, you get the essence of them and the feel of them, they're so much to like about them, they're really wonderful tunes and there's so much hornpipe... Tell me what a hornpipe is. Well, it's in 4/4 time. It's an intrinsically northwest of England tune. Is it? Oh yes, it was born in the northwest of England. And the dance that would be done to it would be like a 123hop 123hop. And then when you wanted to you stepped to it. Usually in the social dances it would be in shoes or shoes with a very very fine thin layer of wood. So it could be a wooden sole but it would be a very fine wooden sole. And it would enable you to make all the sounds you wanted to make with your feet, but not be sort of heavy footed. It was a very light... So you could stomp but not really hard. But the stepping is usually done on the ball of the foot. It's not really much stomping at all. Right here. (muffled) Yeh, its done on the ball of the foot. You're up on the ball of your foot all the time. Oh my heavens! And you'd be spending practically a whole evening like that. You'd be doing stepping and shuffling and high clicks and low clicks. So you're making a sound with the dance, too. Oh absolutely. And a lot of the dances have still got the stepping in them, though people nowadays are not doing it because they did not learn as children as they used to. There's that 30s and 40s gap there. Yes. It's a shame, a shame, BUT there WERE researchers who went round collecting the actual steps before the people died. I know it sounds [unintell] but it's great that they could pass them on. I mean there were 70 year olds sitting in their chairs dancing the steps they'd learnt when they were six so that they could be kept. And I mean that's wonderful. We know of one lady of 80 who was still dancing. We know of one gentleman of 77 who was still dancing and playing the harmonica...he called it the mouth organ...at the same time. And... That's what I'd call a mouth organ! And it's really wonderful. But almost all Hornpipes are in 4/4 time. Just hang on...Mike! Can you play a hornpipe? Yeh. WOULD you play a hornpipe? Is it time to go over...I have a question before...do other people interview you about this? There have been. I mean I've been interviewed on Radio 4 and I've written a book about research. So it's known around England but it's not known in the rest of the world... No, it's not known around England either. You see, you were talking about Martin Carthy before, and he was talking about the English fiddle. Well, I believe there's northern styles and there's southern styles and the hornpipe is intrinsically northern.