The Anglo Concertina Music of William Kimber
Second Edition
By Dan M Worrall and James J Branch
Foreword by Andy Turner
Published by Rollston Press 2024
William Kimber (1872 – 1961) spent all his life in the village of Headington Quarry, a few miles from Oxford. He was at the centre of village life, and gained renown in the wider world of the English folk revival as a Morris Dancer, teacher, and exponent of the accompanying music on the Anglo concertina. Cecil Sharp championed him and asked him to help illustrate his lectures on traditional dance. He became regarded as nothing less than a god in the Morris Dance world. His playing is the benchmark for all subsequent dance musicians on his instrument, and here Messrs Worrall and Branch have provided the tools for lesser mortals to make a stab at exploring how he did it.
This is a much enlarged version of a book that Dan Worrall first published with the EFDSS in 2005. I’m not familiar with that first edition, so I’m unable to offer any comparison. It appears that the previous volume dealt solely with Kimber’s Morris Dance tunes, whereas this new book additionally includes all the tunes he played for Country Dances and other non-Morris material, with a detailed analysis of his playing style and how he achieved the sound he made. There is a musical transcription of each tune in conventional notation, with precise pointers as to which button to press and in which direction to haul the bellows. There are QR codes taking us to recordings of the man himself playing, although this feature is not available on all the tunes as some recordings are still in copyright. But we can hear a computer generated version of every piece, with a mildly distracting ‘piano sound’.
The introduction includes a fabulous history of the place where Kimber was born and bred, Headington Quarry, which comes across as sounding like a Wild West frontier town. The inhabitants of other local villages referred to Headington folk as “Quarry Roughs”, and they were certainly a spirited, stroppy crowd, who prided themselves on being self-sufficient. Like all his neighbours, our William grew all his own fruit and vegetables, and often kept a pig in the garden along with the chickens.
There is a fascinating history of Kimber’s family background. His grandfather and father had both danced with the local Morris Team, and his father, William senior, played both fiddle and concertina. He would sometimes play for the dancers when their regular musician was not available. Our William was one of several siblings, and their father not only taught them all Morris Dancing when they were children, but also encouraged William and his brothers to knock out a few tunes on the concertina. It’s no wonder that Kimber’s playing of Morris Tunes is such a perfect match for the dancing that was done to them. He’d had it inside him all his life, and there is no better proof that the best dancers make the best dance musicians. Once you know how the dance feels, you can’t help putting that feeling into your music. There is an ingredient here that no non-dancer will ever find, one that is beyond words or intellectual analysis.
We discover that Kimber tried his hand from time to time in other musical settings – he sang in the church choir, rang the church bells, drummed with the drum and fife band, and joined a concertina club with his brothers. Although he didn’t read music, there is no reason to suppose he didn’t pick up a few tips from his colleagues in this concertina club, and there were plenty of Anglo tutors in print by this time that could have provided inspiration.
Apart from the Morris Dances, he also played for social dancing in the village – Country Dances, Quadrilles, Lancers, Couple Dances, and step dancing and reels in the pub. Sadly for us, Sharp and his disciples grimly dismissed most of this material as being “tawdry and modern”, and took no interest in it. Luckily for us, though, there has been lots of interest shown since, and in this book we have the music not only for twenty-one of the expected Headington Quarry Morris tunes, but also nine other Morris tunes, eight Country Dance Tunes, eleven tunes for Quadrilles and Couple Dances, four step dance tunes, two song accompaniments, and a transcription of the standard concertina “party piece” – “The Bells”. Fifty-six pieces of music in total. There are decent background notes for each tune, and a very full discography. And scattered through the pages there is a generous selection of photographs and other illustrations.
The time and effort that the authors must have put in to achieve all this is incalculable. Their dedication deserves nothing but our great respect. They have left no stone unturned in bringing Kimber’s style and repertoire into the reach of anyone who’s interested in it.
But I have a few niggles.
Anybody trying to put into words how you play the Anglo concertina has to come up with a huge amount of technical jargon to cover all eventualities. The steadily growing list of publications from Rollston Press and its main mover and shaker, Gary Coover, all dealing with aspects of Anglo playing, has given the world a system of notation which many thousands of followers have benefitted from and grown used to. But some of us from a pre-Coover age might approach things differently.
In my world, the Anglo has a C row, a G row, and a third row. In this book the C row is the “upper row” and the G row is the “lower row”, even though the notes on the C row are a fifth lower than the notes on the G row. We don’t talk about upper notes in music, but we certainly talk about lower notes. It’s confusing to use those words – you don’t know if they refer to physical position or musical pitch. And in the playing position the rows are vertical, so to describe the layout as upper or lower makes no sense.
The book explains how Kimber played his scale of C on the right hand side, by starting off on the C row and jumping to the G row for the few higher notes. This fingering determines some of his unusual chord choices that are constantly referred to. But at this point it might have been worth mentioning in passing that you could also get all the notes of the C scale by staying on the C row from top to bottom. Playing that way allows you to accompany the melody with a more conventional chord sequence and beefier chord inversions. If you’re explaining how he did it, it’s also worth explaining what he didn’t do.
The intricate description of Kimber’s style – essentially unison octaves on both sides plus one or occasionally two other notes – concludes that he very rarely played three-note chords, or triads. Yet at one point there is a chord chart with a few of the commoner triads on the left hand – C on the push, G in both directions and with two inversions, and D minor and A minor, although he hardly ever played those last two. He did, however, sometimes play an F chord, as we can see in the suggested harmonies for some of the tunes, but that triad is not included.
Most of the tunes William Kimber played were in the major scale, so it is enormously puzzling that the first example in the book of how to master his style is the “Bacca Pipes Jig”, which is in the Dorian mode. Almost any other tune of his would have made the point better, and more easily. The only other tune in the book which is not straight major is “Princess Royal”. As it is we are plunged into a discussion of modal scales – always very confusing to some – and then given a diagram of the piano keyboard to explain the intervals of a major or a minor third. No doubt this was meant to be helpful, and might be if you play the piano, but, I suspect, rather alienating if you don’t.
The authors had the interesting idea of comparing Kimber’s version of a tune with a modern player’s take on the same piece. “Constant Billy” is the tune they picked, and the lucky winner in this raffle was the American Bertram Levy. Bertram is in C, and William in G, so there is almost nothing helpful to be gained from this exercise. You have to play the two keys differently on the Anglo – you don’t just do the same thing but in a different place. There must be somebody out there in the world playing a Kimber tune in the same key, so there would be a more direct comparison available.
I never saw William Kimber in the flesh. I did have the EFDSS LP of his music that came out a couple of years after he died, and found it totally absorbing. By the time I got my own concertina in 1968, I was awash with his playing. Since then I have given a lot of thought to how to write down how you play this thing, and have more or less concluded that you can only do so up to a point. You can create a sepia print, but you can’t offer the full technicolour experience. I think you’ll learn more from listening to the recordings you can access through this book than you will from reading what’s on its pages. The amount of life the man puts into his playing is the main lesson here – it’s absolutely sensational.
John Kirkpatrick