Talk:Border Morris

Worcester Christmas Fair
I've seen black-faced dancers on a couple of occasions in recent years at this fair. Would they be Border Morris? And would they be from a specific team? 86.143.48.55 (talk) 16:15, 26 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes. Probably Silurian Border Morris (featured in the main article) which are based in Ledbury but often dance in and around Worcester. Paul (talk) 07:00, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

About the Black Face
Tailkinker, we risk getting into a pointless edit war here about the section "About the black face". Let's resolve the matter here. First thing I want to say is that I started this article and wrote the paragraph about some people claiming Border Morris was related to minstrel shows and "niggering" in general. Let me be clear, I think this view is nonsense. I am a border morris dancer - indeed, I'm the guy holding the concertina in the photo, third from the right. I dance(d) for Silurian (I currently live in Holland so am on "sabbatical" at the moment). However, this view is held by some people and it is worth addressing in the article. "Niggering" was a term used in Hereford and Worcestershire in the 19th Century and I've read this in various books, as well as on line. I don't have the books to hand and hence can't easily provide the reference, although I'm fairly sure it was Dave Jones' book. The question of a connection to minstrel shows is clearly a valid one that needs to be addressed. Minstrel shows were popular in England at the same time as Border Morris was popular and the dress is strikingly similar. I personally don't believe there is a real connection, but it cannot be ignored. Furthermore, the references you asked for and that I provided were perfectly valid. Deleting the paragraph because you disagree with the question is not appropriate. People do question the connection and it needs to be addressed. Far better that you devote your energies to finding a robust rebuttal.

Paul (talk) 20:18, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Quote: 'Minstrel shows were popular in England at the same time as Border Morris was popular' do you mean when Border Morris was first danced or in Victorian times when Morris was revived? If, as I suspect, the latter, it's irrelevent to the history of Morris what the Victorians imagined. Perhaps racism did creep in then, but it doesn't change the original meaning and practice which was purely English folk traditions. PetePassword (talk) 10:58, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110722001251/http://www.silurianmorris.org.uk/musicindex.htm to http://www.silurianmorris.org.uk/musicindex.htm

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Undue weight on blackface
A huge proportion of this article is devoted to the use of blackface in border morris. While interesting, this content is very much WP:UNDUE, given that wearing blackface is not central to the performance of Border Morris, and indeed most border morris teams in the U.S. don't use it. I'd suggest slimming it down significantly. - Sdkb (talk) 22:23, 16 September 2018 (UTC)


 * @Skdb I have gone ultimate WP:BOLD and split it into Border Morris and Blackface. AtlasDuane (talk) 22:09, 30 March 2021 (UTC)