A new publication for the Morris Federation by Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe: The History & Development of Dark Border Morris [PDF only] – revised October 2021.
Chloe presents a history of the ‘dark border’ morris genre and considers reasons for its apparent popularity.
In addition to secondary sources, she includes anonymised quotes from interviews with sixty border morris dancers and/or musicians. She explores the concept of ‘dark morris’ and uses statistics to suggest the number of dark morris teams extant in 2016. She outlines the history of this genre’s development before finally turning her attention to suggesting some reasons for the apparent popularity of this contemporary folk dance genre.