Singing for May Day

Bill Egan and I singing with the children

On May 1, Canterbury Children’s Center had its annual May Day Celebration.  This is May Day in its Celtic finest!  I teach music at CCC.  Every year since my children attended CCC, I have been leading May Day songs and joining in the festivities.  I absolutely love it.  Founded by teachers Judy and Bill Egan, I fondly say that the Canterbury Children’s Center is the best school in the universe.  You can get some hints of that in the pictures.

On May Day, we all dress in white, make fresh eucalyptus garlands for our hair, sing May and spring songs and welcome Dudley and Jacqueline Laufman, who comprise Two Fiddles, a contradance and folk music ensemble.  Dudley recently won a National Heritage Fellowship from the NEA for his music, contra-dancing and storytelling.  The children and teachers sing, clap, stomp, swing, contra dance, retell the pagan story of May Day from Padstow, England, where Morris dance teams dance all day on May first, refuel with snack, and dance around the May Pole to welcome in the spring.

What I love about our May Day celebration is the ritual of music and dance, rituals that humans have been doing for May Day for thousands of years.  The music connects us to each other.  We clap in sync with each other.  We sing old English songs in a round, like “As I mee walkéd in a May morning, I heard a bird sing, Cuckoo,” the final cascade of cuckoos calling in the spring.  We dance in contra dance lines to a fiddle tune called “The Sweets of May,” with lyrics that Dudley wrote, finishing with the exuberant call, “…where the men dance around the ladies, and the ladies dance round the men.” Finally, we dance around the May Pole, which symbolizes the weaving of life, the changing seasons in nature and in our lives, the woven ribbons a reminder that we are all interconnected. We celebrate the wondrous web of life in song, dance, and story.

As we dance around the May Pole, we sing, “Unite and unite, now let us unite for the summer is a-comin’ today and whither we are going, we all will unite in the merry morning of May.”

May you all have a May merry with blooming creativity and song!

Swing your partner!