"Shepherd's Hey"

A morris dance tune ... collected by Cecil J. Sharp from the playing of the fiddler of the Bidford Morris dancers (1906) and arranged in various settings Percy Aldridge Grainger.

• Shepherds Hey Ravensthorpe
  FiddlerNick - Moulton Morris Men dancing Shepherds Hey from Ravensthorpe (Northants). The dance and its tune were collected by Revd Watkins-Pitchford from an old dancer from the Ravensthorpe side in the early 1900's and the details lay in Percy Grainger's papers in Melbourne until they were unearthed by Barry Care in 2004. Recorded Adderbury Club Day, Sep 09 2007 [stick dance w/ fiddle and box].
  
• Shepherd's Hey Morris Dance at Kintbury May Day
  juliacrobinson - Kintbury villagers join in to celebrate May Day! Kintbury Morris and the Garston Gallopers lead the way with Derek Shaw on melodeon: www.also-known-as.org.uk
  
• Cumberland Morris Men perform Shepherd's Hey
  allybeag - A somewhat slow version of this famous dance! Cockermouth Christmas Lights switch-on 2007 [with vocal chorus].

Grainger's versions include a tour de force band piece and an impossible-to-dance-to piano arrangement:

• Shepherds Hey, English Morris Dance, Percy Grainger, SWO Symphonic Wind Orchestra, SYO A1okEZ - "Shepherds Hey" English Morris Dance by Percy Grainger. Performed by the Symphonic Wind Orchestra, conducted by Russell Hammond. The SWO is for wind, brass and percussion musicians aged 14 - 22 years. ... Recorded live on 20 March 2010 at the Sydney Youth Orchestras SYO Autumn Concert at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia.
  
• Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961): Shepherd's Hey
  d60944 - Percy Grainger is a fairly well-known composer, and his interest in collecting and arranging folksongs is also well known. As well as his compositional activities, he was a very fine pianist. No lesser a figure than Grieg transferred his endorsement as the finest interpretater of his own music to Grainger after they met a few years before Grieg's death ... / This recording is of a folksong arrangement by Grainger, and it was recorded by him in 1908. / I particularly like - and am fascinated by - the large degree of "swing" injected into the playing. Stride jazz piano was developing at this time too, and the sort of swing is approaching that (later jazz sort of merged the swung rhythm into a more strict 4/4=12/8, whereas the earlier swung rhythms from the 1910s through 20s were only around halfway toward this outright tripletting effect).

Excerpts from an article by Jonathan Brown in The Independent [London] that gives a good history of morris dancing along with a first-person beginner's account. "Hell's bells! The joy of Morris Dancing" Sept. 21, 2009:

I am standing in a Scout hut on a rainy Wednesday night in a leafy suburb of York, preparing to be initiated in to the ways of morris. Few would imagine that danger is at hand. Morris dancing – with its tinkling bells, clink of pewter tankards and brightly-clad participants – evokes the timeless, gentle charm of an English village. ...

* * *

The good ladies of the Acorn Morris, York's first all-female team (who have been strutting their stuff since 1977), have already nurse-maided me through a gentle Shepherd's Hey – really a dance for children but deemed suitable for a beginner such as myself – before progressing to the slightly more vigorous Brighton Camp, which involves some enjoyable knee-slapping and culminates in a satisfying gurn. I am also allowed to backswagger and caper (these are technical terms) along to a (for me) rather demanding Jenny Lind Polka, named in honour of the celebrated Victorian opera singer known as the Swedish Nightingale and still widely venerated in morris circles.

* * *

To see the Acorn team dance the Skirmish [a lively stick dance] is to forget the tedious old instruction of Sir Thomas Beecham about morris dancing and incest being two of life's more optional leisure interests and instead seek out the stirring description of Philip Stubbs, the 16th-century pamphleteer. Writing in his The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), a sort of Elizabethan version of the Daily Mail which excoriated the declining state of England and the degenerate behaviour of its people, Stubbs turns the full force of his censorious quill on the morris men: "They strike up the Devil's Dance withall: then march this heathen company towards the church and churchyards, their pypers pyping, the drummers thundering, their stumpes dancing, their belles jyngling, their hankercheefes fluttering about their heads like madde men." More than four centuries later, they are still doing so; in fact, the pastime appears to gaining popularity.