Cecil Sharp was a folk song and dance collector. A musician and composer, too, but he’s rightly celebrated as an archivist, teacher and promoter of folk music. He collected nearly 5,000 songs - over 3,000 from England alone - a phenomenal achievement. A late convert to this genre, he didn’t venture into it for the first 40 years of his life. Personality and attitude problems clouded his reputation, but three successive folk revivals - in the early 20th century, in the 1960s and in the 21st century - testify to his efforts in finding, and even rescuing, a prime collection of musical memories for the national culture.
After German born but naturalised Briton GF Handel, it was arguably 150 years before England produced a real composer. Then in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several came along at once. Some, like Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth and Australian Percy Grainger, crafted some orchestral pieces from folk tunes. At the time, and often since, these composers’ works were often downplayed by the musical establishment. It's curious, given that they injected vigour and melody into compositions. And it was hardly new. Indeed Beethoven enthusiastically orchestrated scores of Irish and Scots folk songs. Vaughan Williams himself collected and published 800 folk tunes and hymns, too.
In the 1890s British musical circles had shown new interest in folk music. Notably Parry, Stanford, Stainer and Alexander Mackenzie were all founding members of the Folk-Song Society. They felt English composers would find an authentic national voice without ‘sham or vulgarity’. Though not as passionate as his friend, RVW, Holst incorporated some folk melodies in his own compositions and arranged several songs collected by others. The Somerset Rhapsody (1906-7), was written at the suggestion of Cecil Sharp, using tunes Sharp had noted down. Holst described its performance at the Queen's Hall in 1910 as "my first real success".
Early career
Cecil James Sharp was born on 22 November 1859 in Denmark
Hill, Camberwell, London. His father, slate merchant James Sharp, and his mother
Jane, were both music lovers. The boy, the eldest of 10 children, was named
after the patron saint of music, on whose feast day he was born. He was sent to
the public school, Uppingham, but departed early at age 15 and was then privately
crammed for Cambridge University. There he rowed in the Clare College (second) boat, graduating in 1882 aged 22 with a BA in mathematics.
Undecided on a career, at his father’s suggestion
Cecil emigrated to Australia. In 1883 he got a job in Adelaide (the city he'd apparently chosen because of Beethoven's song of that name), at the
Commercial Bank of South Australia. After reading law with Charles Cameron Kingston, he became associate
to the Chief Justice, Sir Samuel James Way, a post he held for five years.
He’d learned the piano earlier in life and was able to
follow his musical interests, first as assistant organist at St Peter’s
Cathedral, and then conductor of both the Government House Choral Society and
the Cathedral Choral Society. Later he became conductor of the Adelaide
Philharmonic and in 1889 partnered with IG Reimann as joint director of the
Adelaide College of Music. Sharp, with a gift for teaching and lecturing, was
popular in local music circles. But two years later he and Reimann fell out,
and despite a petition of 300 signatures asking him to stay, he quit. After
nine years in Oz he was to head back home.
Return from Australia
Sharp landed in Britain in 1892 hoping to pursue
a career as a composer. In Adelaide he’d written the music for two operettas,
some nursery rhymes and other bits and pieces. But his ambitions in this sphere
were largely stillborn. He was more successful as a lecturer and instructor,
and took on various jobs, at London’s Hampstead Conservatoire of Music, and as
music teacher at Ludgrove, a private preparatory school. He held this post for
17 years, but at the same time took on other musical jobs.
On 22 August 1893 at East Clevedon, Somerset, he married Constance Dorothea Birch, also a music lover. When he’d left school at 15, he’d moved to George Heppel’s “coaching establishment for the Army and University” at Weston-super-Mare, where he met Connie then aged about 13. (He’d passed the Cambridge Local Exam before going to Royston for Cambridge coaching). Cecil, absent for many years, had earlier been engaged to Ida Canning but it hadn’t worked out. He returned to a former sweetheart. Connie was described as a “tall beautiful girl, with brown, wavy hair, and behind some unfortunate glasses, brown eyes: she could sketch successfully, sing and play the violin”. On their wedding day he was 33 and she 31. The couple had four children. Connie was also to help him materially by translating 180 song lyrics from field notebooks to Cecil’s fair copy books.
In 1896 Cecil Sharp was made Principal of the
Hampstead Conservatoire. It was a part time job paying £100 a year but
crucially, with a house included. With Connie’s own allowance of £100 this put
them firmly in the middle class. Sharp was also doing freelance musical work,
lecturing, editing and publishing. This would later cause friction with
Hampstead on issues of payment, and his right to take on students for extra
tuition. After an attenuated dispute he resigned from his post in mid-1905 and
had to leave his house. He kept his Ludgrove School job but from then on most
of his income came from lecturing on and publishing folk music.
The lure of folk
Folk music? How did this come in? For 40 years Cecil had never shown any interest in this field. But on Boxing Day, 1899, while spending the holiday with his in-laws near Oxford, he saw some morris dancers and their concertina player, William Kimber. He was immediately smitten. He notated the tunes and later arranged them, but seemed unsure of what to do next. Yet by 1901 he’d joined the Folk-Song Society, formed in 1898. A year later Sharp published A Book of British Song, including many traditional songs. It showed his new passion and his ideas of the ways folk music might be used.
In 1903 Sharp ‘discovered’ folk songs in Somerset, his happy hunting ground. The first, seemingly, was “I sowed the seeds of love” sung by a gardener, John England, in the village of Hambridge. It’s loaded with symbolism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1WeEn5EQXY
Back in London, seeing the music’s potential for both educational and general publication, he prepared lectures and gained lots of newspaper coverage. For 10 years he energetically promoted the genre and was soon cast as its true expert. This led to problems. At a meeting with Ralph Vaughan Williams and folk music enthusiast Lucy Broadwood to breathe new life into the Folk-Song Society, differences emerged about traditional songs in English schools and other issues. Never a team player, Sharp left the FSS in 1904 in a mood of righteous indignation. More later.
His 1907 effort Folk-Song: Some Conclusions was partly written to set out his stall in a factional dispute. Sticking our head in the lions' den, this and similar arguments still seem to characterise rifts in the folk community. He returned to his interest in collecting dances, with public performances and some regional training programmes. Sharp promoted morris and sword dancing nationally, starting the English Folk Dance Society in 1911. He soon became the period’s highest profile, most prolific, folk music and dance collector, publishing material through the major firm Novello.
Modus operandi
Despite his reputation Sharp was a latecomer to the
folk revival. So how did he operate? He worked alone or with one other person. In
collecting material around England he would send postcards to people in
villages he was to visit, asking for the names of mainly elderly residents who
might know some old folk songs. He would then travel on his ‘trusty bicycle’
and when he found someone appropriate, listen and notate their music or record
it on cylinders. He thought all folk music started as an individual song, story
or poem, and then through evolution, the authorship became communal. No purist,
he said it was ‘easy to be too touchy’ - folk music couldn’t really be
contaminated.
As a teacher Sharp wrote piano accompaniments for some
collected songs. They helped gain a wider audience. He thought people in the
British Isles should be familiar with traditional folk tunes - and the
patrimony of melodic expression that had developed in different regions. Somerset
was his favourite area. Over 1600 tunes or texts were collected from 350
singers there. He used these in his lectures and media campaign to urge the 'rescue' of English folk song. And while his collection spread to 15 other
counties after 1907, the core of his experience and musical theories was clearly
Somerset.
Companion and assistant
Enter Maud Karpeles. She met Sharp in 1909 at a
Stratford-upon-Avon folk competition. She and sister Helen attended his London autumn lectures and began a women’s folk dance team which led in 1911 to the English
Folk Dance Society. Born in London of non-practising Jewish parents, her family
home was at Paddington’s Westbourne Terrace. Maud had learnt German, spending some time
with Berlin relatives studying the piano and violin. 26 years younger than
Cecil, she would make herself indispensable to him as teacher, adjudicator and
secretary.
Sharp at this stage was suffering more bouts of ill health. Maud was particularly helpful to him in 1913 when he was afflicted with neuritis and could not physically write. She joined him on three of his trips to the USA, spending a total of 52 weeks travelling in the Appalachians and noting down the lyrics of the 1600+ songs they collected. The trips, complete with a portable typewriter, meant arduous long hours of walking.
Applachian trips
What prompted these journeys? Sharp was staying in Lincoln, Mass. when Mrs Olive Campbell visited, with tales of the singers she’d come across in the Appalachians. She wanted Sharp’s help to collect more songs. He took the bait, not to explore American folk song but to recover English songs that had crossed the Atlantic with early settlers. In the hills he saw a time warp with travellers from a distant English past. He felt his work at home was largely complete, but viewed the people of the Laurel Country, North Carolina as true descendants. “Their speech is English, not American, and from…the old fashioned way in which they pronounce many of their words, it is clear they are talking the language of a past day”. Cecil Sharp 1917.
The American public then had little appetite for the folk songs, preferring the dances. Cecil and Maud returned from their first trip in December 1916. They went back in 1917 and 1918 so were away for much of the First World War, and at times were suspected of being German spies. Sharp would not in any case have been required to serve due to his poor health. But the move might be viewed as rather self-indulgent. His daughter Dorothea had been in poor health since 1910. His son Charles was badly wounded in the war and in 1917 spent months recovering in Highgate Hospital. Cecil was able to visit him, though. Connie herself had heart trouble after a bout of scarlet fever in 1915. She bore most of the strain and was described as a ‘semi invalid’ for the rest of her life. She eventually died in 1928.
https://youtu.be/VpeWrru9Gqc Cecil Sharp House Choir - The False Knight on the Road, as collected by Cecil Sharp from Mrs T G Coates at Flag Pond, Tennessee in 1916.
Final years
Maud continued her work at the EFDS taking over from her sister Helen in 1921. She was busy - the Society was now a thriving body, with London class attendances reaching 3000 a week. But Sharp’s health deteriorated again in 1923. Throughout his life he’d suffered bouts of asthma, gout (in his eyes), delirium, neuritis, fever, lumbago and bronchitis. Maud accompanied him to Montreux, Switzerland, where her older sister Lucy lived. He had two months of treatment. But back home, on 23 June 1924 Sharp died in London age 64.
After their initial schism, the FSS and EFDS later merged into the English Folk Dance and Song Society. They raised money for a centre in North London, named Cecil Sharp House, opened in 1930. Folk singer Peggy Seeger said when she first came to London in the 60s’ folk revival the venue was a mecca for her. She spent many hours in the library among Sharp’s archive material. The centre is still busy as a focus for study, recordings and a venue for live performances.
Later criticism
Yet criticism has been heaped on Sharp’s behaviour and attitudes. There were critics during his lifetime, too, but the volume grew louder and fiercer when his papers were published. He was against the women’s suffrage movement though his sister Helen risked arrest and violence for her suffragist views. He leveraged sexism, undermining female figures to advance his own standing and commercial value. Georgina Boyes and others have chided Sharp for manipulating and selectively curating the content of the first revival based on his own class, gender and racial views, as well as for commercial purposes.
Sharp was a racist. When he visited Appalachia its cultural
melange of White, Black, Indigenous and multiracial material was 300 years old.
The traditions were hard to disentangle and the influences to disaggregate. Yet
Sharp refused to collect material from black people on his visits. One
diary entry read,“We tramped - mainly
uphill. When we reached the cove we found it peopled by Niggers…all our
troubles and spent energy for nought.” This led him to misrepresent American folk music coming from black or
multiracial roots. He also took stick for minimising female and Scottish
diaspora sources.
In the 70s David Harker attacked the 60s folk revival,
accusing Sharp of manipulating his research for ideological reasons. He said… “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 much of the music had Broadside (ballad
form - often published) origins. And it was absurd to claim 19th century
England was rural - Sharp had misrepresented it.
Of course when Sharp was busy with his English folk
collections, in the early 20th century, others were too. But they
trailed him in the self-publicity stakes. For instance, from 1904 George
Gardiner and Henry Hammond together found and notated folk songs from Hampshire
and Sharp’s stamping ground, Somerset, generating 1400 songs, a number
relatively close to Sharp’s haul. And RVW collected hundreds more.
Self-centred and arrogant? Lucy Broadwood’s letter of 22 July 1924 (weeks after Sharp’s death) to sister Bertha said so. “He unfortunately took up old songs and old dance collecting as a profession and, not being a gentleman, he pulled and boomed and shoved and ousted and used the Press to advertise himself; so that although we pioneers were the people from whom he learnt all that he knew of the subject, he came to believe himself King of the whole movement”.
Assessing Sharp's achievement
Sharp, a curious character, is hard to categorise, but
should be judged more by his own time than ours. A Fabian when at Cambridge, he claimed to be a
‘conservative socialist’. He was a pipe smoker and vegetarian. Maud Karpeles who
lived ‘til 1976, said he wanted respectability. “Any display of singularity was
displeasing to him”. He kept to convention as it “saves so much time”. An
acerbic and competitive personality, he believed in high artistic standards, clashing
with others on the point.
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