Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work of David Harker

Folklore, April, 2002 by C.J. Bearman

The effect on Sharp's reputation has been catastrophic, and in academic circles it has been accepted not only that Sharp interfered with the material in an unscholarly way, but that he did so consciously, in pursuit of ideological objectives. The comments of Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (who footnote their passage to Harker) are typical, and they link Harker's criticism to yet another favourite concept of the Left--that of the "Invented Tradition" (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983):

   It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the English folk-song was invented
   by Cecil Sharp. Of course the songs were collected from singers who were
   supposed to have learned them through an organic and continuous tradition.
   But Sharp's selectivity and editing were such a powerful filter that the
   neutral and scholarly act of collecting became instead the establishment of
   a canon. Not only were lyrics of dubious sexual propriety bowdlerised, but

   Sharp also rejected melodies that were not modal and did not therefore fit
   his theories about the evolution of scales. This unscholarly interference
   is explained by Sharp's ulterior motive ... (Shaw and Chase 1989, 13).

The substance of Harker's article has reappeared three times since 1972, most recently in chapter 8 of his book, Fakesong (1985), and has become a well-established orthodoxy upon which much modern scholarship is based. Vic Gammon has called it "the beginning of serious critical work" on the early folk song movement, and as having taken on "the status of an orthodoxy in some quarters of the British Left" (Gammon 1986, 147). But it has been an orthodoxy established without the slightest attempt to verify the accuracy of Harker's work or to assess the validity of its research base. The only published study has been Gammon's, and he made no attempt to assess Harker's critique of Sharp, concentrating instead on the more modern and more political aspects of the Harker opus. Other commentators have evaded the issue completely: in 1990, Michael Pickering published what purported to be a critical review of modern folk music scholarship, in which he severely handled some work such as the literary scholarship of Roger deV Renwick, but he noticed Harker's publications only to provide uncritical gush about Fakesong as "The best example of this kind of work to date ... Harker has provided a firm foundation for future work" (Pickering 1990, 54).

In my article, "Who Were the Folk? The Demography of Cecil Sharp's Somerset Folk Singers" (Bearman 2000), I tested the validity of Harker's assumptions about the social position of the Somerset people from whom Sharp collected. This article is an attempt to assess Harker's more generalised allegations that Sharp misrepresented his sources, and thereby to test modern critical judgement about Sharp and his work. To avoid the reproach of criticising earlier and possibly superseded work, I have taken my examples, wherever possible, from the most recent appearance of Harker's critique, in Fakesong.