In 1911, he left the Folk-Song Society to head the new English Folk Dance Society; for some years, the promotion of morris dancing was his major commitment. He had already published (with Herbert MacIlwaine) The Morris Book: A History of Morris Dancing with a Description of Eleven Dances as Performed by the Morris-Men of England (1907). For all of his interest in the morris dance, he nonetheless issued One Hundred English Folksongs in 1916. In the introduction to that collection he noted: “The careful preservation of its folk-music is to a nation a matter of the highest import…. The collection and preservation of our folk-music, whatever else it had done, has at least restored the Englishman’s confidence in the inherent ability of his nation to produce great music.”
When Sharp arrived in the United States he was the recognized authority on English folk song and traditional dance,convinced that because the United Stateslacked a feudal peasantry it possessed no true folk music. Olive Dame Campbell would soon convince him otherwise. Campbell, originally from Massachusetts and living in North Carolina, was married to John Campbell, a field worker for the philanthropic Russell Sage Foundation. As the Campbells traveled throughout the Appalachian region, while John investigated school conditions, his wife began collecting mountain ballads. By 1910 she had assembled songs and ballads from singers in Kentucky, Georgia, and Tennessee, but could not find a publisher. Native white folk songs had been overlooked in the nineteenth century, but this soon changed when W. W. Newell, a Harvard professor and founder of the American Folklore Society, published two articles on “Early American Ballads” at century’s end in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF).
Campbell was not the only person to recognize the importance of the folk songs all about her. Katherine Pettit and May Stone, the founders of the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky, in 1902, collected local ballads from children at the school. Pettit submitted musical samples to Harvard professor George Lyman Kittredge, Child’s protégé and successor, who published them as “Ballads and Rhymes from Kentucky” in the JAF in 1907. Similarly, Hubert Shearin and Josiah Combs’s A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs (1911) included 20 Child ballads out of 333 published songs. E. C. Perrow followed with almost 300 “Songs and Rhymes from the South” in the JAF in 1912–1915, drawn from both white and black singers in Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, West Virginia, and Alabama.
Josephine McGill, who lived in Louisville, published Folk-Songs of the Kentucky Mountains in 1917. “From another ancient dame we heard ‘Lord Randal’ and ‘The Gypsy Laddie,’ sung in a squalid mountain cabin to tunes of much charm,” McGill wrote. New Yorkers Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway visited Hindman and the nearby Pine Mountain Settlement School (founded in 1913) in 1916 to gather songs. Traveling throughout much of Kentucky, they quickly published Lonesome Tunes: Folksongs of the Kentucky Mountain, which included numerous ballads published earlier by Child. They focused on what they considered traditional ballads and folk songs, with British origins (although changed over the years, often becoming less violent), believing (erroneously) that mountain folk were luckily untouched by modern society, therefore pure and simple. In fact, most southerners’ lives were influenced by the growing industrialization of the region and modern communications, and they were hardly culturally isolated.
When Sharp learned of Olive Dame Campbell’s southern ballad collection, he changed his mind about collecting possibilities in the United States. He also felt competition from Wyman, Brockway, and other active collectors. So, accompanied by his assistant, Maud Karpeles, Sharp arrived in Asheville in July 1916. Guided by Campbell, they immediately set off to find traditional singers, eventually to collect 400 songs from 67 singers in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Focusing on Child ballads and “traditional” folk songs, Sharp ignored religious music, popular and topical tunes, instrumental songs, and urban/industrial areas. From this first trip and Olive Dame Campbell’s previous work they published English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians in 1917, a work that included 40 Child ballads, two dozen additional English ballads, and more than 70 local songs and nursery songs. The work was a success. “I am so glad of your genuine appreciation of the mountain people,” John Campbell wrote to Sharp in late 1916, “for I grow weary of the manywho come to the mountains simply to exploit the mountaineer.”
Cecil J. Sharp: British Reviver of Folk Song in the States
