Nan Fleming-Williams and The Country Dance Band

Most of what little information we have been able to find out about Nan Fleming-Williams has come from Elaine Bradtke, the Assistant Librarian of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Cecil Sharp House, who kindly sent us a copy of the obituary for Nan Fleming- Williams that appeared in the Spring 1991 issue of Mardles, the English Folk Dance and Song Society Suffolk District Magazine. Ms. Fleming-Williams, née Butler, was a folk dancer and a violinist to whom, in large part, a debt of gratitude is owed for the revival of English folk dance music. Square dance was initially brought to England, as a single music example, by Cecil Sharp in 1919. Further examples were collected and developed by Douglas and Helen Kennedy2 and, about 1943, the Kennedys, together with Nan Fleming-Williams and her husband Brian, started practising as a folk dance quartet, with Nan on violin, Helen on English concertina, Nan’s husband Brian on guitar and Douglas playing the side drum. In 1944 they began playing for Saturday dances at Cecil Sharp House, with Douglas “calling” where appropriate, and “The series has since continued weekly, year in and year out for nearly twenty years” (Kennedy 1964, p. 27-28). A number of the recordings of both the Square Dance Band and the Country Dance Band, on the original 78 rpm discs, were part of the original donations to the Society by Mrs. Savory from her husband’s collection and are in our Library. Nan developed her folk playing style and repertoire from traditional musicians during field research throughout England but she was also a folk dancer of some repute and she taught violin professionally. Mrs. Savory, through whose generosity the British Columbia Folklore Society was created, knew her in London during the Second World War and remembered her fondly as being referred to as “Flaming-Williams””.