The Pipe and Tabor in Morris
Steve Rowley writes;
"The earliest references and iconography of morris dancing and its ancestor, ‘moresk’ dancing, indicate that the pipe and tabor provided the music.
In the early 15th Century, moresk was a fashionable entertainment in courts across Europe. It consisted of exotic dancers from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, dancing wildly to the pipe and tabor. At this time the taborer was a common sight in court and civic circles, providing music for dance, entertainment and processions.
During the latter part of 15th Century it seems that a number of moresk derivatives appeared, not performed by exotic dancers from other lands, but by trained dancers from the court environment. The music remained on the pipe and tabor.
In England the moresk evolved into morris dancing and by the 18th Century had similarities to the morris that we know today. Pipe and tabor remained the primary instrument for morris, even though in other realms of music it was losing ground against more ‘sophisticated’ instruments.
By mid 19th Century, the number of taborers was on the wane. As the old musicians died, no-one new was taking up the instrument. Some morris sides shared their taborer with other sides whilst others recruited musicians playing more modern instruments, like the fiddle and concertina. However, the dancers were known to prefer the pipe and tabor.
Traditionally the taborer leads with the tabor, playing a rhythm that relates directly to the footfalls of the dancers, something that the primarily melodic instruments like the fiddle could not do.
At the end of the 19th century, morris and its music had all but disappeared, and a few years later WWI wiped out many of the remaining teams. The last remaining morris taborer was Joe Powell of Bucknell. Joe played a short ‘D’ tabor pipe and a small shallow tabor.
In the 1920s he was visited by leading figures in the morris revival, notably Russell Wortley and Kenworthy Schofield. Both were inspired to revive the tradition of taboring. Wortley developed a style closely aligned to the morris taboring tradition of beating on the footfall. He favoured the shallow tabor and the short pipe.
Kenworthy Schofield incorporated ideas from early music and the continent to create a new style and indeed, a new instrument. The tabor he played came from the Basque country. It is a deep tabor, approximately 10” x 10”. He asked a fellow dancer from St Albans Morris to help him develop a new low pipe in brass. Kenworthy’s style had a distinctive regular pattern.
Both of these men inspired others to play and soon there was a demand for pipes and tabors. Wortley worked with Barnes and Mullins to launch a low cost ‘D’ pipe based on the Generation tin whistle. Dancers from St Albans Morris started their own production of instruments on the Schofield pattern, Jim Jones making the pipes in stainless steel and Bill Warder making the tabors. After Bill’s untimely death, tabor production was taken up by Mike Chandler.
Since the 1970s, Bert Cleaver and Mike Chandler have been pioneering the Schofield style and it has become the mainstream of morris taboring style. However, it is no longer the mainstream instrument for morris, these days melodeon leads the way, followed by the anglo-concertina, accordion and fiddle.
Jim Jones gave up making the Schofield pipe because of arthritis but Russell Wortley’s Generation Pipe is still in production. Mike Chandler is still making tabors based on Schofield’s Basque instrument." Steve Rowley 2007
(Webmaster's note; Whilst I could understand the desire to genuflect before the oncoming procession, the crouching figure in the photograph is actually taking a photograph himself! More information and some video and audio clips can be found at the Green Man's Morris and Sword Club web site.)