A long gap

Tonight the Oxford Village Band met for the first time since 11 March last year. It was so odd to be playing together again as if we last met a week ago but at the same time aware of everything that has happened since. 

Our band leader, Dave, is an excellent musician and folk historian. He finds old dance tunes and writes really good harmonies for them - each part is worth playing in its own right. He spent lockdown, when his professional band couldn't do any gigs, researching tunes and he brought one this evening called Marriage Bells. He told us that in 1909 Cecil Sharp (a key leader of the folk dance and song revival in England in the early 20th century) was alerted to a church band that played for country dances. He visited and annotated all the dances. Next to one annotation he wrote that its tune, Marriage Bells, had little to recommend it and jotted down the name of the tune that he would use for the dance. Since then everyone has assumed that Marriage Bells was lost but Dave found a manuscript book of Cecil Sharp's where the tune was very roughly scrawled. He said it took him half an hour to decipher the most illegible bar. Anyway, he did it, he has harmonised it and tonight we played it, possibly for the first time since 1909. And it's a fine tune - I don't know why Cecil Sharp took exception to it.