The Dancing
Three Quarter Time track 1
We learned this from June Tabor’s album Apples. Originally titled ‘Saturday Night at the Adam Smith Hall’, The Dancing was written by Andy Shanks and Jim Russell, inspired by stories they were told by residents of an old people’s home at Kirkcaldy in Fife. It was created as a result of Andy and Jim doing songwriting workshops at Appin House in Kirkcaldy, as part of the New Makars Trusts Celebrating Fife in Song project. They recorded it on the CD Between the Tay & the Forth (NMT03) a selection of songs about Fife.
Here's some background to the song, as told by Andy Shanks:
Mary would not believe it if you told her. It must be at least eight years since Jim Russell and I visited Appin House just outside Kirkaldy to listen to the folk there and try to get some stories and maybe a song or two and met Mary and her friends. We played some tunes and had a laugh and over five weeks heard some wonderful stories about life in Kirkaldy through the years. It was quite something to see those rows of furry slippers bobbing up and down to the sound of the melodeon. One gentleman in a wheelchair had a snare drum and said not a word till we started playing then he sat up and started playing, bright as you like, never missed a beat, till we stopped and he drifted back to his quiet and never said a word.
It seems million miles from the darkened anticipation of a June Tabor concert, the polite conversation of a few hundred admirers the glow of the gear on stage, the last minute adjustments of a pony-tailed roadie. Mary would not believe it if you told her, but tonight Mary’s story would take centre stage and her words would be heard on similar stages all over the world as June Tabor performs the opening song from her new album ‘ Apples’ …’ The Dancing’
A number of years ago Jim and I were asked if we would take part in a new venture called the ‘New Makar’s Trust‘ which Gifford Lind had set up to fund and promote songwriting in the community; not just written by songwriters but by ordinary people singing about their place, their lives, and the things that bothered them. The project was to write songs about Kirkaldy.
So there we were in an old folk’s home listening to stories of how they used to make dens out of the rolls of lino and hide there until the supervisor caught them. The mining stories were not of disasters and dust but of the girls in the office giggling, laughing, and chatting to the miners. Not even a whiff of a folk song we thought until they started talking about the dancing.
Who would have believed there were so many places to go dancing in Kirkaldy? There was a place called ‘Harvey’s Jumpers’ where you went to learn when you were young and didn’t know the dances. It was no more than a front room, by all accounts, with the old man playing the accordion while his son showed you the dances. There was even one dance hall where it was the Salvation Army band that played the music. We used to keep the chat light and Jim started joking about young men being awfy difficult to keep in line and I chipped in with something about Mary no having any bother wi the boys and she became quite serious for a moment and said ‘ No we never had any bother. It just never happened. For the dancin’s the dancin’ … It was just left at that, final as if there was nothing more to said about it. We caught that in the mini disc recording we were making at the time and you can hear her saying it on the New Makar’s album ‘ Between the Tay and the Fourth’ as Davy Scott who produced that particular track loved the idea of bringing the actual voice of Mary into the recording.
A few years before this Jim and I had sent June Tabor some of the songs we had been writing and, God bless her she really liked them. She recorded the song ‘The Fiddler’ on her album Aleyn’ and we met her a few times and talked of songs and music. ‘Send me everything you write ‘she said. So now and again, we did just that. We sent her a copy of four or five songs we had recorded in East Kirbride when we were making a CD of the songs for the New Makar’s project. We heard little about them for a long while until early this year June phoned Jim up to say she was using the song ‘ The Dancing ‘ in concert and was going to use it as the opening number on the new album ‘ Apples’.
Well, the album is released next week and the first seven and a half minutes take you back to the dance halls of Kirkaldy and Mary. I can still see her sitting there reliving her youth in the stories she told us. It is rather wonderful to look at a PRS statement and see fees from venues in America and who knows where else where June Tabor is playing. I think of Mary’s story touching the lives of so many people who would never meet her.
My favourite line from the song is where I drop to a minor chord and sing ‘ The fate of two people can’t matter at all ‘ Which June stays pretty faithful to on ‘Apples’ and I think about what that kind of song writing is all about. The fate of real people and their stories do matter and, in some ways, it’s what folk music is all about.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100426021540/http://www.andyshanks.com:80/index.php?p=1_10_June-Tabor-