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

   folk song as mediated by Cecil Sharp [was] to be imposed on town and
   country alike ... not in its original form, but ... made the basis of
   nationalistic sentiments and bourgeois values (Harker 1972, 240). [8]

It is this allegation of wide-ranging and general change which has stuck and has been repeated by Harker's followers. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw have already been quoted. Elsewhere, Georgina Boyes has claimed that the "cultural products of the rural working class were taken from them and daintily and selectively re-worked" (Boyes 1993, 47).

So, the question is to what extent Harker's generalised allegations were justified, and some qualifications have to be made here. As has already been observed, Folk Songs from Somerset was a songbook for the general public, published in an age in which amateur music-making was the norm. With the best will in the world, some changes are inevitable in such circumstances. Folklorists and other scholars may be fascinated by dialect words and incomplete or incomprehensible texts, but amateur singers are not. The challenge faced by Sharp and Charles Marson--a challenge faced by every other editor of material from oral tradition--was how to present the songs in a popular form without doing too much damage to their integrity. It is not enough to make vague allegations about "hundreds of alterations, additions and omissions." Some distinction must be made between minor changes for the sake of comprehension, instances in which words were augmented, and cases of major alteration which completely changed the character of the song.

To provide a comparative table, I have chosen to analyse Series Four of Folk Songs from Somerset. The first three Series were jointly edited by Sharp as Musical Editor and Marson as Textual Editor, but in 1906 the two men quarrelled and the last two were edited by Sharp alone. In order to discuss Sharp's editing practice, and to avoid fruitless speculation about where Sharp's influence began and Marson's ended, I have analysed Series Four, the first volume which Sharp produced on his own. The only texts which Harker discussed in any detail appeared in Series One and Two, although the scope of his survey included the first four Series of Folk Songs from Somerset. By analysing Series Four, it is possible to discuss Sharp's editing practice while remaining within the scope of Harker's critique. [9] Series Four contained twenty-five songs, which can be classified as shown in Table 4.

In my Ph.D. thesis, I have provided copies of these texts as published and as collected, so far as this can conveniently be established (Bearman 2001, 241-303). Two songs were compilations given for the sake of general interest ("Jack Hall") or because of a splendid tune ("John Barleycorn"): in these cases, the Somerset singer had provided only the tune and the first stanza of the song. The rest came either from a printed source or from singers outside Somerset. The remaining twenty-three songs came substantially from single sources in that the tune and at least half the words had been collected from one person.