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 <winston@slac.stanford.edu> 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

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