The name of the dance is spelled in several different ways, largely depending on which speculative etymology the particular writer prefers to believe. The 'official' spelling in the mid C20 appears to have been 'Baccubert', but 'Bacchu-Ber' now seems to be preferred.

The dance belongs to the village of Pont de Cervières near Briançon in the Dauphiné. The earliest record of it is from around 1804; the tradition ceased some time after 1939 (likely as a result of the War) but was, I gather, revived in the late 1960s or early '70s.

The melody was traditionally sung, not played, for the dance; originally by 'old women', but by the 1930s Les Amis du Baccubert (a local organisation established to preserve the tradition) had decided that young, unmarried girls were a better option. When Violet Alford saw the dance in 1939, there were five of them.

'The girls seated themselves on a bench, tight packed like gay birds on a bough, Les Amis cleared a space and the singing struck up. The girls never slackened the tempo nor dropped a fraction in tone. The pace was breathless - for them but not at all for the dancers - and the effort was severe and prolonged. About forty-five figures make up the whole dance, and a figure may take many repeats of the tune. Thirty years ago (1910) a fiddler was introduced, whose instrumental version became very different from the sung version. It was noted, but no longer bears any value, neither does a version shewn me by the Académie Provençal, nor again the noted version with a sharpened 7th found in Millin's Atlas.[A L Millin, Atlas pour servir au Voyage dans les departements du midi de la France, 1807]. Now the singers are nearly back again to that noted by Tiersot in 1895 from the old women singers, and published in his Chansons Populaires des Alpes Françaises [Paris, 1903]. In my notation the three bars in brackets [bar 9, tied semiquavers to bar 13, semiquaver rest, below] were sometimes omitted and the tune picked up in bar 13. The singers were evidently quite unconscious of skipping, and it made no difference to the step or figure. I have heard Catalans, singing in a café, do precisely the same thing. One supposes the bars are of so little interest that they do not notice their omission, but it is more curious when words have to be skipped too as in the Catalan song. The Baccubert has no words, but carefully ordered syllables,

Et tra la la, laderatanla, laderata .....

These the girls were inclined to blur, but when one made a real mistake the others looked sharply at her, so the unmeaning syllables evidently are of importance.'

Violet Alford, 'The Baccubert' in Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 4.1, 1940, 8-14.

Beneath is the tune as Miss Alford noted it. Structurally there are noticeable differences from the form of which Malicorne (and, some years earlier, Jean-François Dutertre) recorded an arrangement: the latter has perhaps been regularized a little, but neither indicated where they had got it, and it may perhaps represent a characteristic form of the tune at another time. As Miss Alford mentioned, the tune had been subject to various changes over the years and had been noted several times; these various examples are compared in detail in André Carénini (ed), Le Bacchu-Ber et la Danse des Épées dans les Alpes Occidentales (Aix-en-Provence: EDISUD, 1996).


X:1
T:The Baccubert
S:Noted by Violet Alford at Pont de Cervieres, 16 August 1939.
B:'The Baccubert' in Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 4.1, 1940, 8-14.
N:Accent markings omitted.
L:1/8
Q:1/4=100
M:2/4
K:Bb
@"Lively" F | G A G G/A/ | B c c B/c/ | d c B B/c/ | d d d e/c/ |
d3/2d/ {d}g2 | f2 d d/e/ | f f f g/e/ | d3 c/B/ | c B z A/B/ |
c d c A/B/ | c d c A/B/ | d2 c d | G2 z A | Bcde |
d c/B/ B F | G3 G | Bcde | d c/B/ B F | G2 z |]