Morris ails

American morris ales (large morris dancing events) look to be an endangered species.

I was idly wondering about the Toronto Ale (held by Green Fiddle Morris, Toronto, ON) and went looking online… and couldn’t find anything recent about it. There was one in 2018, and from 2019 there are photos on the Toronto Morris Men Facebook page of what they referred to as “The Toronto Ale (Lite)” — apparently just six teams, all from Ontario. Then an unsurprising “VirtuAle” in 2020, and I can’t find anything since then.

I don’t even know very well what other ales used to be out there, but I found a northeast-centric list and looked for those, as well as some others I know of:

• American Travelling Morris (American Travelling Morris, Northeastern US) — yes in 2024 [not an ale, but ale-like in some ways]
• Dog Days Ale (Bassett Street Hounds, Syracuse, NY) — demised (last in 2019)?
• Gilbertsville Tour (Binghamton Morris Men, Binghamton, NY) — yes in 2024 [not so much an ale — a four-team weekend tour]
• Half Moon Sword Ale (Half Moon Sword, New York, NY) — yes in 2024
• Harvest Ale (Juggler Meadow Morris Men and Wake Robin Morris, Amherst, MA) — yes in 2024
• Marlboro Morris Ale (Marlboro Morris and Sword and Marlboro Morris M, Marlboro, VT) — yes in 2024
• Midwest Morris Ale (varies) — yes in 2024
• Onion River Ale (On the Border, A Sworded Affair, and Midnight Capers, Burlington, VT) — demised (last in 2019)?
• Suds (Bouwerie Boys Morris Dancers, New York, NY) — demised (last in 2019)
• Toronto Morris Ale (Green Fiddle Morris, Toronto, ON) — demised (last full ale in 2018, last diminished ale in 2019)?

I presume Dog Days and Onion River were done in, if they actually were, by the pandemic. The Suds and apparently Toronto ran into trouble before that, in about 2019. It’s gratifying that some of the ales and ale-like events look to have weathered the pandemic well, in addition to the general aging of many morris teams, and are seemingly healthy, but the (apparent) losses have been major.

Not that morris ales haven’t gone under before — few, I think, have had more than maybe a decade of longevity. The Five Day Wonder, the NoWeare Ale, the Mixed Morris Ale, the Foam, all had their day and ended. Still, this many ending in such a short time is troubling… and I don’t know of new ones to take their place.

An unfortunate thing with morris in North America, inhibiting knowledge of what’s going on, is its balkanization. Once upon a time there was the American Morris Newsletter, connecting American morris teams via snail mail; later the Morris Dancing Discussion List, an email list server. Both gone now. There was a Morris Dancing Wiki but it’s moribund. There is most recently the North American Morris Dancing Organization with ambitions of connecting and documenting American morris, but it hasn’t come to much. What’s left for information dissemination are websites and Facebook pages, both of which one often finds are woefully out of date, and beyond that — word of mouth, pretty much.