Folk music has long acted as a universal preservative for common history and culture. Folk songs encapsulate lived experience and daily life in a completely unique way, making them invaluable legacies for a history, which is often excluded by traditional scholars and writings. Taking a place in almost akin to something succeeding the ancient rhapsode (a performer from ancient Greece), folk songs preserve oral history and tradition in a way that has endured the ever-changing and developing society around them, where other oral histories have not.
In the world of English folk song, we have one specific man to thank for this preservation: Cecil Sharp. Born in 1859, Sharp dedicated much of his life to the study and collection of English folk music, creating some of the most extensive documentation of folk music to date. Although he was born into a musical family and worked as a music teacher in Adelaide in his youth, it wasn’t until the 1890s that Sharp turned his attention to folk music. He felt that speakers of English ought to be familiar with the musical traditions of the regions they were native to. In 1903, he began collecting folk songs in Somerset, resulting in ‘The Somerset Songs’: over 1600 tunes or texts collected from 350 singers. He used these songs to bolster a press campaign urging the ‘rescue’ of English folk song. Sharp collected music from fifteen other counties in England after this, but ‘The Somerset Songs’ remained one of his most influential collections in terms of its impact.
Sharp also incorporated the songs he collected into song books designed for use in schools to teach children their musical heritage. These books often included the traditional tunes and lyrics Sharp had collected, but with new piano parts composed by him. As virtually all folk musicians sung unaccompanied at the time, some scholars have argued that by combining the traditional melodies and texts with modern piano accompaniments, these widely circulated song books undermined the authentic folk music tradition. However, it must also be recognised that by transforming folk songs into easily readable pieces of music which resembled a more conventional classical style, Sharp increased the popularity of these songs, triggering a folk revival movement.
Following the success of his collections, Sharp also became interested in English folk dancing. After watching groups of Morris dancers performing traditional dance, Sharp devised a set of notations to document and preserve the dances. That said, at this time, Morris dancing styles differed highly from one rural area to another, and the urban popularisation of Sharp’s notation led to the overshadowing of some regional styles by those preferred by Sharp. In 1911, Sharp founded the English Folk Dance Society, later becoming the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which today, is based at Cecil Sharp House in Camden.
During the First World War, Sharp emigrated to America. He heard that the folk-music practised in the Southern Appalachian Mountains was largely of British origin, and thus could provide an invaluable source for observing much older English folk songs, which had perhaps been forgotten in England but were preserved through English immigrants in the Appalachians. He made several long expeditions to the remote mountain backcountry to carry out these collections, generally on foot, across difficult and steep terrain. He considered the Appalachian settlers to be like the ‘English of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century’, with music equally unchanged and traditional. That said, many of these expeditions were deliberately to areas of majority white settlers with British ancestry, meaning that Sharp’s collections completely overlook the multi-cultural aspect of Appalachian folk music, which was heavily influenced by German, black and indigenous folk music as well.
Sharp directly contributed to the start of an Edwardian folk-music revival period in Britain in the early 20th century. It was a time of rekindled interest in the past of the people of Britain, of rediscovering culture and tradition that had been formerly dismissed as uninteresting or unimportant due to its ‘common’ audience. That said, this was also a period of rising nationalism, and the folk-revival movement provided a platform for such sentiment. Along with composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, folk music and its adaptation into classical styles provided a framework to foster and promote British national identity and patriotism. Acting to display both Britain’s rich musical past (through traditional texts and melodies), as well as its sophisticated musical present (with rich orchestral arrangements), folk-music collectors encouraged and appealed to a certain jingoistic sentiment that upheld both imperialism and anglo-supremacy in England.
Additionally, it must be recognised that Sharp’s own classicism and racism bled into his work. The folk-music collectors of the early 20th century were largely upper-class eccentrics, who viewed the music that they were collecting as – at best – a representation of a highly romanticised, pastoral, idyllic (and completely invented) past. This is obviously a highly misguided view; modern scholars tend to instead view folk music as a source through which we can deepen our understanding of everyday life or culture for the classes so often neglected by pre-modern historians. Additionally, Sharp’s collecting work in Appalachia is not necessarily representative of the actual folk-music culture he encountered: he was clearly solely interested in tracing the path of English music, at the expense of the rich and multi-cultural musical scene of the Appalachians; he has been accused of deliberately refusing to collect fiddle tunes, hymns, and songs of African American origin. His pursuit of reenforcing a nationalist British identity through music resulted in biased selectivity, undermining the potential for an accurate and representative preservation of Appalachian folk-music.
Over the course of his lifetime, Cecil Sharp collected and transcribed over 4000 folk songs – most of which we probably wouldn’t have today without him. He is arguably the single greatest contributor to the folk-revival movement in the UK during the early 20th century, which propelled folk music back into the public consciousness. This ultimately paved the way for the second folk revival of the 1960s, which gave us so many of the iconic musicians we still love today (Bob Dylan, Fairport Convention and Joni Mitchell, to name a few). Although far from perfect, Cecil Sharp’s work has enabled the continued preservation and recognition of English folk music and with it, the history of our folk themselves.
