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It's Burns Night - And Wee Willie Will Dance!

WillFly
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WillFly Distinguished Member

WillFly

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I'm at a music session in Ditchling in Sussex tonight - which happens to be Burns Night - and will be bringing my jig doll, Wee Willie, out to dance from time to time. Jig dolls - called "limberjacks" in the US - are a very old form of street entertainment. A jointed wooden doll is fitted with a horizontal rod on its back and bounced on a piece of flexible birch board so that it dances.

 

My dolls are made for me by a Suffolk maker called Chris Harvey. This one is my own design - a combination of two of Chris's designs. He used to make a Rolph Harris "Jake The Peg" doll with three legs (bet that one's out of fashion now), and a Scottish male doll. So I got him to combine the two by making a triple-legged doll - except that the middle leg is... what a Scotsman has under the kilt... Wee Willie's "middle leg" is actually made of lead to give it a bit of swing, and if you look carefully, you might see it making an occasional appearance, fleetingly, from under the kilt...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIUPkF2k_6I

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WillFly Distinguished Member

WillFly

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I almost chocked on my tea !! :)

 

 

Will : is this a tradition of some sort? I mean those dancing doll things.

Just back from dancing it at the session tonight - great fun!

 

As I said in the original post, they were a form of street entertainment in cities in the UK and North America - mainly carved and danced by itinerant street entertainers at the turn of the 19th/20th century. There was a very famous one in Liverpool in the early years of the 20th century called Seth Davy - a black guy. There was even a song about him with words like,

 

"Come day, go day, wishing my heart for Sunday,

Drinking buttermilk all the week, whisky on a Sunday."

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