Despite continuing ill health, Sharp managed to visit Virginia and North Carolina in April 1918, ending with another 625 tunes before returning to England. He presided over the expansion of the English Folk Dance Society, offering classes in London that attracted a weekly attendance of 1,000. Until his death in 1924, Sharp continued to believe that only ballads, folk songs, and dances seemingly untainted by modern society should be collected and promoted.
During the 1920s, with the passing of such pioneer collectors as Sharp, Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson, and Cecil Baring-Gould, the Folk-Song Society fell on hard times, and there were few important scholarly collections published. Beginning in 1921 Ernest John Moeran recorded the traditional East Norfolk singer and farmer Harry Cox, as well as his neighbors, often in local pubs on Saturday nights. Cox was eventually to sing more than 100 songs, most of which he had learned through oral tradition. Alfred Williams, one of the few collectors born in a working-class family, published Songs of the Upper Thames in 1923. But to the romantics of the first generation, the well was running dry. In 1931 Vaughan Williams pessimistically commented that “the materials for publication is now practically exhausted and it is most unlikely that any new material will be discovered.” With only 123 members in 1933, the Folk-Song Society merged with the much larger (almost 2,000 members) English Folk Dance Society, creating the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS).
Before his death in 1924, Sharp was unable to publish an expanded edition of his southern collections, but Maud Karpeles finally issued English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians in 1932 containing 274 songs in 968 variations, as well as a few play-party games. Among the songs are scattered American ballads such as “John Hardy,” “Poor Omie,” and “The Lonesome Prairie.” Folklorist David Whisnant has concluded that despite Sharp’s traditional values and romantic view of rural southerners, “he was by all odds the best-trained, most humane and open-minded collector working in the area at the time.” While certainly not definitive, his southern collection set a high standard. As for Olive Dame Campbell, she founded the John C. Campbell Folk School near Brasstown, North Carolina, in 1925 and remained active in promoting traditional southern arts and crafts until her death in 1954. Sharp and Campbell together demonstrated the close connection between ballad collectors and folk music in England and the United States, which would long continue.
The Radif of Persian Art Music
