The meeting of Cecil Sharp and the Headington Quarry Morris Men and their young musician William Kimber on Boxing Day 1899 is the founding legend of the first English folk dance and song revival. It was a moment that would spark a movement, reviving not just Morris dancing but also the musical traditions that accompanied it.
One of the key figures in this revival was William Kimber, whose distinctive playing style on the concertina became iconic in Morris dancing circles. Today, we delve deeper into Kimber’s legacy and the broader world of traditional folk music with Dan Worrall, a retired geologist and small-time farmer living in Texas, who is also the co-author of the newly-released second edition of The Anglo Concertina Music of William Kimber.
Welcome to Tradfolk, Dan, and thanks for chatting to us. So how did a Texan geologist end up writing a book about one of the central figures of the English folk revival?
I’ve played the Anglo and English concertinas for about 50 years, at times with small music groups for social dances and tune sessions, but more often just for my own amusement.
When I retired some twenty years ago, I started to write about concertinas. The first edition of the William Kimber book came out in 2004, published by the EFDSS. Then I wrote a two-volume Social History of the Anglo-German Concertina in 2008, a compilation published in 2012 by Musical Traditions of older Anglo players around the world called House Dance, a book about north Clare concertina player Chris Droney in 2022, and finally the second edition of the William Kimber book this year. The latter two books were co-authored with my friend Jarrett Branch.
I’ve been leading a concertina workshop in Palestine, East Texas, since 2004, and have been an editor of the online The Concertina Journal since 2016.
OK, maybe we need to rewind further. Where did your interest in the concertina and William Kimber first come from?
I first encountered a concertina in a music shop in Austin, Texas while a student in that town, in about 1974 or 1975. I bought it on a whim, knowing nothing about it. At that time, there was no internet, and I knew no other players (I learned later that there were likely no other skilled players within a thousand-mile radius of where I was living!)
Luckily for me, a friend soon pointed out that there were two newly released LPs featuring traditional concertina playing; The Flowing Tide by Chris Droney and The Art of William Kimber. Both were Topic releases, and they had a profound effect on me. They were quite different from the rock ‘n roll I had heretofore been listening to!
The playing techniques of neither style were in reach for me at my earliest stage of Anglo playing, and there were no nearby mentors or printed tutor resources of which I was aware. As a first step, I played my Chris Droney LP at half speed, which dropped each note an octave in pitch but slowed down Chris from lightning fast to just fast! I transcribed a few of his tunes and worked to learn them. About that time, I visited Ireland and met Chris, which was a huge help and inspiration.
there were likely no other skilled players within a thousand-mile radius of where I was living.
Kimber’s playing was much more difficult, as he often played fistfuls of notes at once. Which buttons was he pushing? How was he putting the chords together? And why did he choose those particular chords? For non-Anglo players, I should point out that a thirty button Anglo is a puzzle box with lots of alternative ways to play many of its notes. Bewildered, I left Kimber on the shelf for a decade or so, before returning with cassette tapes, again slowing him down to half speed and an octave lower.
There were still no useful printed tutors, but by this time, I had learned that English harmonic-style Anglo players played the melody on the right hand, and the chords on the left. With this information, I took off, learning one tune after another, but always transcribing them first. There is a lot of muscle memory needed in learning how to play in a harmonic manner, and transcriptions help give order to that repetitive practice. Learning those tunes was a hobby thing, taken up on the occasional rainy afternoon. By the late 1990s, digital slow-down software emerged and made transcribing much easier to do.
That’s an incredibly impressive learning process, given you were essentially flying solo and one that’s quite unimaginable in the age of Spotify and online communities and archives. I imagine the internet made this process much easier?
Yes. At the site concertina.net I met several players from England, but most of them played in a style more or less taken from English melodeon playing with its oom-pah chords – not particularly similar to Kimber. One of these folks, Essex musician Roger Digby, encouraged me to publish my Kimber transcriptions so that others could see them, which I soon did with the EFDSS.
That first edition was mostly transcriptions with not a lot of analysis – I hadn’t yet got to the point where I could summarise that very well – and nothing on his life. In the subsequent 19 years, I’ve learned a lot about the details of his playing techniques and thought they were worth documenting in a tutorial format. Also, as I got older I gained more appreciation for how important understanding a musician’s life is to understanding his approach to playing, so I began to research his life story. Fortunately for me, others like Theo Chaundy and Derek Schofield had already blazed the largest part of that trail.
I then began to find many more audio recordings of Kimber from online sources; many of those recordings are of non-Morris social dances. Three years ago, a young player that I met at our Palestine concertina workshop (Jarrett Branch) offered to help me with the transcription process. We’ve worked together to finish the collection of tunes and then put out the new edition of the Kimber book, with all its new transcriptions, the biography, and the tutorial.
The internet is loaded with folk materials these days, at least for William Kimber. The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library is especially rich with Kimber materials, and Folk Arts Oxford had a wonderful website called merryville.uk with a lot of unpublished recordings. Along the way, I also discovered the recordings that Peter Kennedy made of Kimber in the 1950s. So, there was a lot of material to sift through, even for someone living in Texas. What would once have been an impossible task geographically has become quite feasible, thanks to folk archivists and the internet.
The book includes tutorials and transcriptions of Kimber’s music, which is often described as crisp and buoyant. How did you go about analysing his playing style, and what can modern musicians learn from it?
Even though William Kimber is a larger than life figure for Morris dance adherents, not many concertina players of today play in his manner. It is a shame, really, because he plays in a very simple and accessible manner on a two-row concertina that hearkens back to older times. Much less muscle memory is required to play tunes his way, and yet the crisp briskness of his playing is second to none.
His chording is amazing, with many surprises and a rather quaint and antique sound. His chord progressions and cadences are often not what we modern listeners would expect. Here is where his biography comes in; he was a village musician in an era when most people in his village played melody instruments like fiddle or tin whistle, or pipe and tabor. He had no formal training (indoctrination?) in how chords ‘should’ sound. His way of chording, completely managed on only the two bottom rows of the left-hand side of the concertina, was primarily intended to give rhythm and volume to dancers, not necessarily to appeal to an audience of listeners.
His basic technique involved adding notes on the left hand that were an octave lower than the melody notes that were played on the right, and then adding third interval higher notes to those lower octave notes. It is astonishingly simple, and yet gives a marvelous sound, with surprising minor chords and often a modal feel that stem directly from that process. No need to memorise chord charts and the like!
Could you tell us more about his accompaniment techniques and how they shaped his performances for both Morris dancing and village dances?
He only added those left-hand partial chords when needed by the dancers – usually, on footfalls. It wasn’t intended to be ‘pretty,’ but to give the dancers some volume and rhythm that could be heard in a noisy street performance with all those bells jingling. Very effective and sprightly.
How significant was Kimber’s collaboration with Cecil Sharp for the revival of Morris dancing, and what might have been different without his contributions? Kimber was celebrated in high society, even performing for royalty. How did his fame impact his life and his role in preserving traditional English music and dance?
There were of course other Morris traditions than that of Headington Quarry that were active at that time, as I’m sure your readers know better than an outsider like me. But without Sharp (and let’s not forget Mary Neal), the big boost of national interest that kept Morris alive would probably never have happened. People reading in contemporary national newspapers about Kimber playing and dancing for royalty tended to pay more attention to and respect this old art form.
As a bricklayer by trade, I can’t imagine Kimber had much financial security. How did he balance his, often national travel for performances, with his need to provide for his family?
Brickwork was by the job, not a full-time company career, so he managed to get off work and help Sharp when needed, but still maintain the ability to be rehired afterwards. Nonetheless, his life was difficult financially. Brickwork was fickle, and Morris ‘work’ was only very periodic, and yet he was raising a family with six children. More than being just a bricklayer or a musician, he had to be an avid gardener and a small scale pig farmer to raise the money and food needed to keep the family going. Not something we tend to think about these days.
The book also explores Headington Quarry. How did Kimber’s upbringing and community shape his identity and his music?
Quarry was an isolated cultural outlier during the late nineteenth century and as mentioned above that outlier status played a key role in shaping him as a musician. With the nearby establishment of the Morris Motors automotive factory in 1913, Oxford quickly grew outward over the old rural village, changing everything.
When a village’s population grows by two orders of magnitude, with floods of arriving outsiders, maintaining all its old village social customs is usually impossible, and of course Quarry was not alone in this regard. With Kimber’s and Sharp’s efforts, Morris dancing in Quarry lived on, and today the Quarry Morris side remains active and vibrant, with an excellent Anglo player (Andy Turner) providing the music!
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
The main goal of the book is to show how William Kimber played his music, and why he played it that way. The biographical material is simply a backup to that. I don’t play for the Morris – the nearest side is perhaps hundreds or more miles from here – but I would hope that Anglo players who do play, or wish to play, for the Morris might try Kimber’s nineteenth century playing techniques. The oom-pah chords used by modern English melodeon players sound great, but then, so does Kimber with his simpler approach on the Anglo. Kimber played for the Morris for perhaps 70 years or more, and that long experience and learning counts for a lot! Plus, it is fun to play these tunes, even out here in Texas.
Do you have a favourite tune from Kimber’s repertoire? If so, why does it stand out to you?
Bacca Pipes and Constant Billy each nicely demonstrate the qualities and techniques just mentioned, and we highlight them in the tutorial section of the book. That long chapter is intended to help players of any skill level latch on to what he was doing.
The Anglo Concertina Music of William Kimber by Dan M Worrall and James J Branch is available now from Amazon and additionally in the UK at Red Cow Music, and in Australia at The Concertina Shop. Its publisher is Rollston Press of Honolulu Hawaii, headed by concertina aficionado Gary Coover, who has published an amazing array of learning books for various types of concertinas.
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