Cecil (James) Sharp - Sharp in America, Books

Collector of folk songs and dances, born in London, UK. He studied at Cambridge, became a lawyer, then turned to music. He published several collections of British and US folk material, and in 1911 founded the Folk-Dance Society. His work is commemorated by Cecil Sharp House, London, the headquarters of the society.

Cecil James Sharp (1859–1924) was the founding father of the folklore revival in England in the early twentieth century, and many of England's traditional dances and music owe their continuing existence to his work in recording and publishing them.

Cecil Sharp was a music teacher and composer interested in folk songs and music, who became interested in traditional English dance when he saw a group of Morris dancers at the village of Headington Quarry, just outside Oxford, in 1899.

The revival of the Morris dances started when Mary Neal, the organiser of the Esperance Girls' Club in London, used Sharp's (then unpublished) notations to teach the traditional dances to the club's members in 1905.

Sharp often published versions of the songs he collected, which included a part for piano that Sharp composed himself. However, the piano versions did help Sharp in his goal of teaching English folk music to children in schools, thus "reacquainting" them, as he felt, with their national musical heritage.

The schools project perhaps also accounts for Sharp's practice of heavily bowdlerizing the lyrics, which, at least among the English songs, often emphasize sex and violence. Thus, there are often great differences between the songs as recorded in Sharp's field notes and what he published.

Sharp also helped instigate a period of nationalism in English classical music, the idea being to reinvigorate English composition by grounding it in its national folk music.

In 1911 Sharp founded the English Folk Dance Society which promoted the traditional dances through workshops held nationwide, and which later merged with the Folk Song Society in 1932 to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS).

Sharp in America

During the years of the First World War, Sharp found it difficult to support himself through his customary efforts at lecturing and writing, and decided to make an extended visit to the United States. Large audiences came to hear Sharp lecture about folk music, and Sharp also took the opportunity to do field work on English folk songs that had survived in the more remote regions of the southern Appalachian Mountains, pursuing a line of research pioneered by Olive Dame Campbell. Traveling through the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, Sharp and Karpeles recorded a treasure trove of folk songs, many using the pentatonic scale and many in versions quite different from those Sharp had collected in rural England.

Sharp's work in promoting English folk song dance traditions in the USA is carried on by the Country Dance and Song Society (CDSS).

Books

Maud Karpeles lived on for many decades after Sharp, and gradually succeeded in converting the collected Sharp manuscript materials into massive, well-organized volumes.

Cecil Sharp's Collection of English Folk Songs, Oxford University Press, 1974;

For a sampling of English folk songs as they emerged from Sharp's editorial pen along with his piano accompaniments, see:

English folk songs, collected and arranged with pianoforte accompaniment by Cecil J.

Sharp also wrote up his opinions and theories about folk song in an influential volume:

English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (originally published 1907.