Campbell urged Sharp to visit Appalachia and discover for himself the wealth of folk song and ballad “survivals” around her Asheville, North Carolina home. Intrigued, the following year he returned to the United States and set off on a very productive southern trip that would further strengthen the connection between folk song and ballad collecting in Great Britain and the United States.
Sharp was late to folk music. Born in England in 1859, he obtained a law degree at Cambridge University before moving to Australia in 1882 to practice; he returned to England ten years later determined instead to devote himself to a career in music. While embarking on a period of teaching music and serving as the principal of the Hampstead Conservatory (until 1905), he first heard William Kimber playing the concertina in 1899 and saw the Headington Morris dancers in Oxford. The happenstance experience planted an interest in traditional music. The morris was a traditional dance style seemingly derived from pagan rites, using bells, swords, and sticks to frighten away evil spirits, and usually performed by men.
FouryearslaterSharptookdownthe text andtuneof“The Seeds of Love” as sung by John England. He was launched on a song collecting career that would last until his death in 1924. With the assistance of the Reverend Charles Marson, Sharp was eventually to collect 1,500 songs in Somerset, a handful of which appeared in the five volumes of Folk Songs from Somerset (1904). He had already published A Book of British Song for Home and School (1902), soon followed by English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (1907). Sharp didn’t trust published song texts, believing that local field collecting would capture the authentic folksongs that had been orally transmitted. He was soon to repudiate his earlier argument in A Book of British Song for Home and School that had promoted popular, national songs for the classrooms. Only local vernacular songs, with their musical purity, he insisted, rather than popular tunes should now be taught to students. This was certainly a romantic view, but nonetheless widely shared among the other amateur collectors who gathered in the Folk-Song Society.
Organized in 1898 by Sir Hubert Parry, a director of the Royal College of Music and a professor of Music at Oxford, and other music professionals, the society was designed to promote the circulation of ballads and folk songs in order to promote national unity and moral uplift. This would hopefully counter the perceived rise of class conflict and urban decay, a popular belief of the day among conservatives. The society published the Journal of the Folk-Song Society, which included information on English, Irish, and Scottish songs. While the society attracted Ralph Vaughn Williams, Sir Edward Elgar, and other popular composers, it languished until energized by Sharp’s involvement after 1904. Sharp stood his ground as a folk song and folk dance purist. He intended to promote nationalism through connecting vernacular music to England’s peasant legacy, thereby, he believed, elevating the nation’s musical taste and character. Sharp’s field collecting and prolific publishing spurred a British folk revival. (Similar folk revivals were taking place in Germany and other European countries.)
Sharp’s self-promotion did not go unchallenged—one former colleague complained “He puffed and boomed and shoved and ousted, and used the Press to advertise himself.” Moreover, Sharp obtained royalties from folk song and dance books, without compensating the informants. (It was an issue that proved highly charged in Britain and the United States for the next 100 years.) Additionally, composers such as Vaughn Williams, Percy Grainger, and Gustav Holst used folk melodies in their classical compositions (as did many of their European counterparts), and also declined to compensate the traditional performers.
Cecil Sharp and English Volk Music
