Remembering the life of Cecil Sharp founding father of the folklore revival in England in the early 20th century (22 November 1859 – 23 June 1924)

 

Cecil James Sharp (1859-1924), musician and folk-music collector, was born on St Cecilia's Day, 22 November 1859 at Camberwell, London, eldest son of James Sharp, slate merchant, and his wife Jane, née Bloyd, both music lovers. Cecil attended Uppingham School, University College School, London, and from 1879 Clare College, University of Cambridge (B.A., 1883).

After Cambridge his father suggested he go to Australia to seek his fortune. He arrived in Adelaide, where his first job was washing hansom-cabs, then as a bank clerk. He also taught violin, and continued with his amateur musical interests, for which he became well known in Adelaide. From the bank he moved to a legal firm. However he resigned this job, and started on a full-time musical career, as an organist, pianist, conductor and then as a teacher at Adelaide College of Music.

Sharp was well liked; he was a debonair young man. He was musical director in 1883-84 of the Adelaide String Quartet Club , assistant organist to Arthur Boult at St Peter's Anglican Cathedral and conducted its choral society, for which he arranged Nursery Ditties (Adelaide, c.1890), and also the Government House choral society which performed his settings of Guy Bppthby's Dimple's Lovers in September 1890. Later he conducted the Adelaide Philharmonic Choir.

In 1889 Sharp, who had many pupils, became co-director with Immanuel Reimann of the Adelaide College of Music. Sharp's students adored him but he resigned after two years. He had written an operetta to a text by Boothby: Sylvia, produced at the Theatre Royal in December 1890.

He returned to England in 1892, taking various musical jobs as a conductor and teacher. He was appointed music-master at Ludgrove, a prepartory school for Eton. Sharp married Constance Dorothea Birch. also a music lover at Clevedon on August 22nd 1893. They had four children, Dorothea, Charles, Joan  and Susannah By 1900 he had written some forty works; few were published. He taught at several schools and at the Metropolitan College, Holloway, and was principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music in 1896-1905.

Early attempts at becoming a composer largely resulted in failure and frustration, but two chance meetings led to significant changes in his life purpose.

The first of these was on Boxing Day, 1899. Staying for Christmas at Sandfield Cottage, the home of his mother-in-law in Headington, Oxfordshire, Sharp overheard a style of music he had never encountered before. Watching from his window, he saw the Headington Quarry Morris Men dancing to the traditional tunes, ‘Laundnum Bunches’ and ‘Rigs O’Marlow’, which he quickly noted down. 

Morris dancers performed in unusually exotic costumes, and their repertoire involved a form of martial dancing whose origins are somewhat mysterious. The term is though to be a derivative of “Moorish” or “Moroccan,” and dates back to the 1490s, when dances known as the moresca were performed in Spain in celebration of King Ferdinand (1452-1516) and Queen Isabella (1451-1504)'s move to eject the Moors from the Iberian peninsula. In fifteenth-century England, Morris dancers would blacken their faces in what was apparently an imitation of the darker North African Moors, but by Sharp's era they had retained only the bells attached to their boots and their somewhat fanciful North African-inspired garb. By the time that Sharp saw the dancers on the street, the Morris groups were a dying breed, with just a handful of active groups in England left.

Stepping outside, he met with William Kimber, the side’s musician, who agreed to return the following day and play more tunes. This he did, and Sharp took down two further tunes, ‘Beansetting’ and ‘Constant Billy’. 

His second significant meeting came in September 1903, Cecil Sharp visited his friend Reverend Charles Marson in Hambridge (Somerset).  During his stay, he heard Marson's gardener, the appropriately named John England, singing  the traditional song The Seeds of Love as he mowed the lawn.  Sharp was gripped by some strange enthusiasm.  He grabbed a pencil and notebook, then wrote down the melody and words.  Over the next few hours, Sharp worked on his notes, and devised a piano accompaniment for the song.  That evening, The Seeds of Love was sung by his protégé, Mattie Kay, to the other visitors in the house.  Someone present remarked of Sharp's new arrangement that it was the first time that folk-song had been presented in evening dress. As Sharp’s confidante and biographer, Maud Karpeles, wrote in 1967:

“Sharp was sitting in the vicarage garden talking to Charles Marson and to Mattie Kay, who was likewise staying at Hambridge, when he heard John England quietly singing to himself as he mowed the vicarage lawn. Sharp whipped out his notebook and took down the tune; and then persuaded John to give him the words. He immediately harmonised the song; and that same evening it was sung at a choir supper by Mattie Kay, Sharp accompanying. The audience was delighted; as one said, it was the first time that the song had been put into evening dress.“

That was 1903. Sharp was 44 years old. Perhaps tired of struggling as a never-quite-there composer, he threw himself into his new passion with a zeal that altered the fate of English traditional music.These events led Sharp to realize that there was a wealth of traditional dance and folksong material that needed to be preserved. He would devote the remainder of his life doing just that.

Sharp became the most enthusiastic of the Morris collectors, travelling the length and breadth of England in search of the dances and their associated tunes. Particularly before the Great War, Sharp cycled and walked many miles, collecting folk songs and morris, sword and country dances.

His notebooks contain over 1700 variants. The first collections he published were part I of Folk Songs from Somerset (with Charles Marson) in 1904, and The Morris Book (with Herbert Macilwaine and George Butterworth) in 1907; a list of his published collections is in Maud Karpeles's biography. In 1918 Percy Grainger arranged Country Gardens, a Morris dance which Sharp collected; Grainger could never persuade Sharp to accept half the royalties. They differed too on folk-music collection methods, Sharp preferring the pad and pen to the phonogram. Other parts of The Morris Book were published, with Part 5 in 1914, in association with George Butterworth. As a result of these labours he also published The Sword Dances of Northern England (1913), 3 parts, and The Country Dance Book, (1909), 6 parts. A number of morris and sword teams started up, notably Thaxted Morris Men in 1911.. In the same year Sharp founded, and in 1912-24 directed, the English Folk Dance Society(cdss.org)

Traveling with his associate Maud Karpeles, Sharp visited North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky, collecting over 1600 tunes that resulted in the publication of two volumes of this music.  The travel was arduous and his health was not good at the time.
The two formed lifelong connections with many of the mountain residents.  His work was also documented with a series of photographs.  Maud Karpeles carried on this work after his death and became Sharp’s biographer.  In 1950 she returned to the area to record this music and located a number of people from their previous encounters.After 1918, Sharp never did return to America but his influence continued.

In 1919 he became an occasional inspector, in folk-song and dancing, of training colleges, to spread his enthusiasm among teachers and in 1923 his old university made him an honorary master of music; in the House of Commons he was described as one 'to whose work in this field British education owes an almost irredeemable debt'.Next year he completed The Dance, a historical survey of dancing in Europe, with Adolf Paul Oppé.

While at Cambridge, Sharp heard the lectures of  William Morris and became a Fabian Socialist and lifelong vegetarian. He was cautious in his public statements, however, feeling that he had much to lose, since, unlike Morris, he was not independently wealthy but dependent on outside funding for his researches. Respectability was important to him, increasingly so as he got older. According to his biographer, Maud Karpeles: "Any display of singularity was displeasing to him; and he followed the convention in behaviour as well as in appearance unless there was a very good reason for departing from them. 'It saves so much trouble,' he would say." During the post World War II "second" British folk revival of the 1950s and 60s, Sharp was occasionally chided for this by leftist critics such as Bert LLoyd. C. J. Bearman writes that "Lloyd was effectively the first to offer public criticism of Sharp and of the first revival generally. This critique was from a Marxist perspective: Lloyd (1908–82) had associated himself with the Communist Party since the 1930s. ... However, he was always more pragmatic than doctrinaire, and he combined criticism of Sharp's philosophy and methods with high and unreserved praise for his motivation and the epic scale of his achievement."

 His own description of his political beliefs - 'Conservative Socialist' - coupled with his regular support for Liberal Party candidates, only serves to deepen the confusion concerning his political values.

Sharp has also often been criticized for the way in which he ran roughshod over some of his fellow-collectors and their work, not least by Lucy Broadwood. Recalling his mannerisms in a letter dated July 22, 1924, she wrote:

“[Cecil Sharp] unfortunately took up old songs and old dance collecting as a profession, and, not being a gentleman, he puffed and boomed and shoved and ousted and used the press to advertise himself; so that, although we pioneers were the people from whom he originally learnt all that he knew of the subjects, he came to believe himself to be King of the whole movement.”

As Lucy Broadwood noted, Sharp was a driven man who “puffed and boomed and shoved and ousted” until he got what he wanted, which, ultimately, seems to have been wider recognition of the traditional folk songs and dances that he so loved. It is very tempting to simply describe him as a man of his time and leave it at that, but few of his contemporaries managed to create quite such a difficult reputation for themselves.

In 1993, Georgina Boyes published The Imagined Village – Culture, ideology and the English Folk Revival, which argued (amongst many other things) that Sharp was deeply sexist and sought to undermine the female leaders of the first folk revivalist movement. He was known to be anti-suffrage, despite his sister, Helen Sharp, being a prominent member of the Suffragettes.

Sharp’s views on race are also the subject of frequent debate. Both his Appalachian Diaries and the writings of his assistant, Maud Karpeles, make use of derogatory terms for people of colour, and contain an oft-cited instance in which the pair arrived at a cove called Sylva, only to leave without collecting songs because the population was largely black. However, it has also been argued that Sharp was one of the only collectors to collect (on different occasions) from people of colour, and that the instance in Sylva may have been the result of ill-health and feeling out of place. His use of derogatory terminology might also be attributed to his being “a man of his time”. However, neither of these explanations account for an outburst on page 247 of his diary  in which he complains of the town smelling of, “tobacco, molasses and n****r”.

Then there's the question of theft.  Defenders of Sharp grow furious when they hear such terms. Sharp can be presented in almost Biblical terms as a suffering, ageing man, working almost alone, dedicating himself with a selfless, single-minded intensity to the preservation of a folk heritage.  How could anyone call this secular saint a thief?  It must be remembered that for much of his life folk song wasn't simply a passion for Sharp, it was also a career.  He earnt his bread and butter by talking about and teaching folk song.  Inevitably, he had to present himself as an authority on the topic, and this led him to downplay or deny the influence of other collectors.

But more seriously than this, Sharp actually copyrighted much of the material he collected: if not the original tune or dance, then his arrangement of the tune or dance.  Legal experts Richard Jones and Euan Cameron note: 'The "folk" were seen to have passed on the folk song, but had no conception of this process and, in consequence, made no creative contribution to the song." On at least one occasion, a dance troupe realized the implications of his actions, and denied Sharp permission to use their material. Sharp's collecting was not a two-way street: he gave nothing back to the people from whom he took material. 

Clearly, collecting folk-songs wasn't simply a means for him make money: the dedication he showed to this cause went far above and beyond that. On the other hand, one can assume that throughout his collecting, Sharp was thinking about his career: he wanted to generate an income from folk song and, less creditably, he wanted to prevent rivals from blocking his rise.

Long plagued by asthma, he died on  Midsummers day 23 June 1924 at Hampstead. Survived by his wife, three daughters and a son, he was buried in Golders Green cemetery.

In 1930, six years after his death, the Cecil Sharp House was founded in London, dedicated to the preservation of folksong and dance. The English Folk Dance Society amalgamated in 1932 with the Folk Song Society; in 1930 their headquarters had become Cecil Sharp House.

A world-class dedicated folk arts centre, Cecil Sharp House is at the heart of English folk. With a unique history.the venue is a memorial to Cecil Sharp.Vibrant and diverse, Cecil Sharp House exists to serve its wide and diverse audiences - engaging with art lovers (oft times folk art lovers) through unique and inspiring artistic events, and creative learning. The iconic Grade II listed building is home to the English Folk Dance and Song Society and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, England's national collection of folk music and dance.

Cecil Sharp remains a complicated and controversial figure, and a troublesome one for many interested in traditional music who may find it difficult to reconcile his reported views with the fact that he did so much to save the songs and dances they love from extinction.Sharp's achievements are indisputable.  Sharp's legacy as a collector and promoter of folksongs and dances would echo throughout the music community in a number of ways. His labor laid the groundwork for a revival of Morris dancing and he would influence English art composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and George Butterworth.

The EFDS's dance courses alone must have encouraged thousands of people to take an interest in folk dance.and Sharp's collection of folk songs is still consulted by folk singers today.Folk music as a result is certainly not dead, it is living and breathing and keeps developing and that’s what makes it so vibrant. I conclude with this wonderful short documentary that further explores what has been written about above.

Sweet Was Those Notes , The Songs of Somerset - The Singers