Country Dance and Song Society

Lifetime contribution Award 2008

The CDSS Governing Board is pleased to announce that Dr. Anthony G. Barrand is this year’s Lifetime Contribution Award recipient. The honor, first awarded in 2002, was established to recognize individuals whose life’s work has had a profound and lasting influence on the dance and song community.

Tony Barrand is a teacher, morris and clog dancer, singer and scholar, based in Brattleboro, Vermont. He is on the faculty at Boston University as part of The University Professors, an unusual and inventive teaching program; his courses include Stalking the Wild Mind: The Psychology and Folklore of Extra-Sensory Perception and Psychic Phenomena, English Ritual Dance and Drama, and Folk Songs as Social History.

Tony is probably better known, however, as part of the singing team John Roberts and Tony Barrand who have delighted audiences across the United States for almost three decades with their a capella duets of English folk bawdry and balladry, morris and clog dancing, monologues and storytelling. Their most recent releases are Heartoutbursts: Lincolnshire Folksongs Collected by Percy Grainger and Naulakha Redux: Songs of Rudyard Kipling. Hail Smiling Morn is the fifth recording in a series with the Christmas pageant, Nowell Sing We Clear, with Andy Davis and Fred Breunig.

Much of Tony’s research and teaching has focused on various forms of the seasonal display dances now known generically as morris dancing. His most recent work is an edited collection of Longsword Dances from Traditional and Manuscript Sources: As Collated and Notated by Ivor Allsop (Northern Harmony Publishing Company, 1996). Over the past seven years, Tony’s interests have shifted to the presence of Lancashire mill culture in New England (for example, the New Bedford Concertina Band from 1913). Of particular interest is the wooden shoe or clog dancing which came to the United States by the mid 1840s, thriving on minstrel and vaudeville stages until just before World War II; work is in progress with several American families, notably the Marleys of Rockville, Connecticut. The award presentation will be held on March 28, 2009, from 1-4 pm, at Oak Grove School in Brattleboro, VT.

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Country Dance and Song Society
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