Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work of David Harker - Research Article - Critical Essay

Folklore, April, 2002 by C.J. Bearman

Abstract

David Harker's criticism of Cecil Sharp's work has been called the "beginning of serious critical work" on the early folk music movement, and it has become an orthodoxy which later commentary has accepted without question, taking its accuracy and the validity of its research base on trust. This article shows that the trust has been misplaced. It uses a fresh, more complete and more rigorous analysis of the Sharp MSS to show that Harker's criticism is inaccurate, innumerate, flawed in its methods, and unjustified in its assumptions. It forces a reassessment both of Sharp's work and of Harker's, and renders untenable many of the assumptions upon which modern interpretations of the early folk music movement in Britain are based.

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Introduction

This article is about Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), the dominant figure of the early twentieth-century folk music movement, and the way he has been dealt with by modern criticism. Sharp was a London music teacher who, between 1899 and 1903, discovered the existence of a surviving oral tradition, and who devoted the rest of his life to a campaign of collection, publication, organisation and publicity. [1] Sharp was by no means the only significant collector of English folk music or the first in the field. His predecessors in the 1880s and 1890s had included Sabine Baring-Gould, W. A. Barrett, Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson and Kate Lee; several published collections of folk songs had appeared between 1878 and 1895; and the Folk Song Society was founded in 1898 (Bearman 2001, 38-43). Sharp owed something to all these predecessors--most of all to Baring-Gould--but he rose to predominance because he was a different kind of collector who brought together and embodied a number of trends which distinguished the post-1903 revival from the movement of the 1880s and 1890s.

Sharp brought to folk music collection an intensive, professional approach which meant that he collected and published far more than his predecessors or any of his contemporaries. He made his name as collector and analyst with the five volumes of Folk Songs from Somerset (1904-9), spending 330 days collecting between 1903 and 1907, interviewing more than 300 singers, and amassing nearly 1,500 tunes (Fox Strangways and Karpeles 1933, 63). His Somerset work formed the research base for his theoretical book, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (Sharp 1907). By the end of his life, Sharp had collected nearly 5,000 tunes and published some seventy volumes, most of them in collaboration (Fox Strangways and Karpeles 1933, 221-3). At the same time, his work was more thorough and more scholarly in its presentation than anything which had gone before. Sharp was among the pioneers of "collection in depth," visiting singers time and again to explore their repertoires fully and to examine variations in their singing; the first publication of his Somerset material in the Folk Song Society's Journal in 1905 set new standards in the presentation of folk music. Partly because Sharp depended on music for his livelihood and could not afford the attitudes of the gentleman amateur, he had no aversion to publicity. Others, such as Lucy Broadwood and Frank Kidson, were more representative of the Folk Song Society's membership in regarding folk music as something for the private enjoyment of consenting adults: as a thing for the study, the salon party, or the chamber concert. Sharp regarded it as a lost heritage which could and should be restored to the nation at large, beginning with schoolchildren. In English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, he harnessed folk music to the educational preoccupations of the time, and these--overwhelmingly nationalistic and patriotic as they were--gave the material a definite cultural value and a political stance.

The movement of 1903-14--the so-called "first revival"--was in many ways a freak, a sport of nature which depended on a particular and unrepeatable combination of political attitudes, public taste, and technological development. Although the movement attracted official support from the educational authorities after 1919 and enjoyed its highest levels of membership and participation in the early 1920s, it never recovered the momentum or the fashionable status it had before 1914. Sharp died in 1924 and with his passing the movement seemed to suffer a general failure of nerve. The organisation he founded--the English Folk Dance Society--lost whatever radicalism and dynamism it had ever possessed, and it and its successor, the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EDFSS), continued into the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in a genteel sort of way, accepting folk music's place as a minority interest rather than as a mass movement. Sharp's reputation underwent a similar transformation. During his lifetime he had been a controversial figure, often regarded as the bull in the Folk Song Society's china shop. With strong opinions, no great fund of tolerance, an appetite for controversy, and a tongue to match his name, Sharp was not on good terms with the contemporary music establishment or with many of his colleagues in the folk music movement. He was most popular with those younger than himself--the musicians of the next generation such as Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), Gustav Hoist (1874-1934), and George Butterworth (1885-1916)--and with the members of the English Folk Dance Society, the great majority of whom were young women (Bearman 2001, 99). But as the controversies of the past were forgotten, Sharp came to be regarded as a conservative, rather authoritarian, figure.

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Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work of David Harker - Research Article - Critical Essay

Folklore, April, 2002 by C.J. Bearman

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