I've changed the name on the thread, to reflect the change of subject to historical background.
I acknowledge Alan's point, that, unless a pre-Cecil Sharp source shows up for the use of the term 'gypsy' as a country dance figure, the bulk of my hypothesis falls apart. As for the use of the terms 'gyp' and 'gypsy' in Morris dance, *The Morris Book* by Cecil Sharp and Herbert Macilwaine defines the figure "Half-Hands or Half-Gip" in part I, page 65, and defines the figure "Whole-Gip or Gipsies" on page 32 of Part III. No explanation for the derivation of the terms is given in either volume. I do not have a copy of Sharp's Country Dance Book at hand. Did someone say that Sharp did not use the term gypsy in it? Jacob On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 4:40 AM, Alan Winston <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On 10/24/15 10:32 PM, Jacob Nancy Bloom via Callers wrote: > > See the link below for more information on the dance The Spanish Gypsy (or > Jeepsie), the song from which the tune for the dance came, and the 1623 > play from which the song came, which had the title "The Spanish Gypsy". > > http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/lod/vol4/spanish_gipsy.html > > I'll go out on a limb and make some historical pronouncements which cannot > be proven, but which seem most probable to me: > > The dance title The Spanish Gypsy came from the dance being done to a tune > associated with the play The Spanish Gypsy. > > Sure, extremely plausible. > > The dance figure Gypsy got its name from the prevalence of the figure in > the dance The Spanish Gypsy. > > > If true, only true in the modern revival. (Basically, Cecil Sharp made up > *and named* the Gypsy figure. In Spanish Jeepsie - reconstructed at the > link you have above- the figure isn't a gypsy, and it isn't called a > gypsy. It's a back to back.) > > Point me toward dance notation published before 1900 that uses the term > "gypsy" as the name of a figure, and then we can talk. Until there's some > evidence that Elizabethan dancers used the figure name, your argument dies > here. > > The Morris dance figures whole-gyp and half-gyp were originally called > whole-gypsy and half-gypsy. (Although parts of England had and ancient > tradition of seasonal dancing under the name Morris Dance, it seems likely, > from the nature of the dances, that the form of the Cotswold dance > traditions collected by Cecil Sharp only went back to the Elizabethan > period.) > > I think you're saying that Cotswold dances as collected by Sharp and > others reflected Elizabethan country dances as shown in Playford, and that > whole-gyp and half-gyp were therefore originally named after the (notional) > country dance figure and were thus properly named whole-gypsy and > half-gypsy. Please correct me if I've misunderstood this. > > This is irrelevant unless you can show that Elizabethan country dance > actually had a figure called gypsy, which you haven't. (And it's actually > irrelevant even if you can, since once you draw a line from the play to the > tune to the dance you've said what you can about it not being an ethnic > stereotype.) > > But if it *were* relevant, I'd ask you to explain why these > Playford-following Elizabethan morris dancers used "half-gypsy" for what > Playford called "sides all". > > -- Alan >
