VII. 



THE PIPE AND TABOR 



An Address to a Society of Morris Dancers, 

 Oxford, February 12, 1914 



In the following pages I have brought together 

 some scattered information on the instruments, 

 especially connected with Folk-Dancing, which 

 give the title to my address. The coming to life 

 of a mass of beautiful tunes and dances, in response 

 to the patient search of Mr. Cecil Sharp and a few 

 others, is one of the most magical occurrences of 

 which I have any memory. In a less degree I have 

 experienced the same sense of the unexpected, in 

 learning that in a Kentish village, so near London 

 as often to be darkened by the skirts of town fogs, 

 the ancient superstition still existed of telling the 

 bees that their master is dead. Such an unsus- 

 pected lurking of primitive belief in our midst may 

 well give a shock of surprise. But in the resur- 

 rection of the mass of hidden music, and of 

 the dying traditions of dances, a web of extra- 

 ordinary beauty is suddenly revealed — a matter 

 of real importance. 



If tunes have souls they are shut out by death 

 from ever again vibrating in a human tenement. 

 They are like the gabel-rachels, the souls of un- 

 baptised infants whom men in Yorkshire used 

 to hear crying round the church as though begging 



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