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

Folklore, April, 2002 by C.J. Bearman

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.

Eleven of these twenty-three songs were published with texts unchanged or with minor alterations. Only one text appears to have been published absolutely as collected, and that was "The Dilly Song," but in most other cases the changes were minimal and made for the sake of comprehensibility or singability: in "The Bonny Lighter Boy," the singer had been unable to remember half of the first stanza; in "Ruggleton's Daughter of Iero," the collected words were printed almost verbatim except for the change in the third line of the second stanza from: "He said: Good wife is my dinner ready now?" to: "Ho! is my dinner ready now?" The only questionable instance of editorial intervention in this section relates to one of the best-known songs in the whole of Folk Songs from Somerset: "Searching for Lambs" from Eliza Sweet of Somerton. Sharp claimed that "the Somerton version needed only a little rearrangement to be quite complete" (Folk Songs from Somerset, Series 4 1908, 84). But comparison of the collected and published texts shows that Sharp inserted a complete stanza (stanza 4). This has to be attributed to an "improving" spirit which is hardly in tune with Sharp's claim of minimal intervention, but it cannot be taken as having changed the character of the song. The stanza which Sharp inserted is the most pedestrian in the text: the phrases which one would readily attribute to an "improving" hand--such as, "Your pretty little feet they tread so sweet" (in stanza 2)--were printed exactly as collected.