Plough Monday is the first Monday in January after Twelfth Night or Old Christmas. It marked the time in England just before the weather got good enough to go out and start preparing the fields for planting. It was the season when the ploughboys and other farm workers had been out of work for some time and were running short of money to spend in the pub. So gangs of them would put together a simple dance or two, perhaps a song or maybe a wooing play and go door to door demanding food, drink and perhaps a little cash in exchange for their performance. Otherwise, they might do some damage to the lawns with the plough they carried with them. They called themselves Molly Dancers in part because half the group often dressed up in women's clothing.
Green River Tap and Die is a Molly team based in Western Massachusetts. There's no one else like us closer than New Jersey where Handsome Molly keeps the tradition alive. We first met at Welcome Yule, a Midwinter show that continues the ancient celebration of the return of the light in the depths of the cold midwinter season. We developed a Molly dance for the show and enjoyed it so much we decided to start an independent Molly team.
Plough boys are in short supply these days. Most of them went off to work in the mills where they eventually became unemployed factory workers. We think unemployed factory workers are a good model for Molly Dancers and we proudly wear our Troublemakers Union badges on our kit. In fact, we even wrote a dance to go with a song called The Factory Lad.
