also the english are weird about folk culture. we are. we've relegated our folk dances and music to the zone of esoteric nerd shit that only weirdos do, and then we go looking for esoterica in the non-english parts of our heritage because we don't think we've got any of it of our own
Okay actually this is really interesting. So one of the main reasons we have so much embarrassment about our folk traditions is actually the Great Depression. There was a lot before it: the Victorian antiquarians being their usual selves, the loss of huge numbers of dancers (who tended to be young men) on the battlefields of WWI, the general movement of fashion and fad, but one of the things that really killed off traditions was monetising it.
Clog dancers particularly used to draw massive crowds. There were competitions all over the world, and performers were among the biggest stars of the variety stage. But clog dancing is easy to set up. "If you whistle the tune, I'll fit the steps in" as one dancer once said. This meant that during the Depression, it became fairly common to see talented, competition winning dancers on street corners, trying to earn some money.
It became so stigmatised by this association that dancers stuffed their prize medal belts in the loft and forgot about them, and wouldn't even talk about them to children and grandchildren.
We owe the survival of our traditions to men like William Kimber, Cecil Sharpe, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and to the work of Maude Karpeles, who taught the dances to her Esperance Club girls in London and took the traditions around the world again. What we have now is a revival and a survival, and we wouldn't have any of it without a few dedicated nerds who collected and preserved what they could before it was all lost in war and economic decline.
It was also World War I.
Take for example Molly dancing, the traditional dances of East Anglia. This was primarily danced by plough boys - with the joke being that in the winter when everything was frozen and there was nothing to plough they would come and dance in people's gardens until they paid them to go away.
Then a whole generation of plough boys went off to war and didn't come home. Molly as a living tradition died with WWI and had to be (and has been) revived from written and oral testimonies of those who remember watching the dances when they were kids.
Folk music, dance, song, they were all primarily working class traditions, shared during work, around hearthsides, in pubs. These are the people who are hit hardest by war and economic hardship.
The impact was also particularly brutal where the hammer fell heaviest because of the Pals Batallions. The theory at the start of the war was that If you made up units of men who already knew each other, they'd support each other better. They made up the Pals, young men who grew up together, fought together, and then died together.
If the figures I've seen are right, Bradford saw 1 in 60 of the city's entire population killed or wounded on the first day of the Somme. Basically in the space of an hour. A generation of young men. Adderbury Morris Men had six dancers and a musician in 1914, and only one of them returned. He never danced or played again.
They learned from the Somme. For one thing, they didn't send 18 year olds to the front until the Spring Offensive of 1918, when they lowered the minimum age from 19 to 18 and a half. But traditions died in the trenches.
If you're interested in the survival of morris dancing, I highly recommend The Way Of The Morris. It's a beautiful and deeply moving film. Available through the BFI and apparently on Prime: https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-way-of-the-morris-2010-online
