New subject: [Callers] Advice about "gypsy"

26 Oct 2015

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 
 <http://www.pbm.com/%7Elindahl/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

Re: [Callers] Advice about "gypsy"