Cecil Sharp. Practically a deity to folk performers. As legendary singer-guitarist Martin Carthy tells me, ‘We’d be absolutely lost without him’. However, this remarkable individual’s achievements as a collector of vast quantities of folk music at source were built on conventional classical music foundations.
Cecil Sharp, the early years
Sharp’s music-loving parents realised that his birth on 22 November 1859 (in London’s Camberwell area) had fallen on St Cecilia’s Day, named after the patron saint of music. Hence ‘Cecil’. His mother gave him early piano lessons, but things developed apace when Sharp boarded at Uppingham School, from 1869. Uppingham’s headmaster, the Revd Edward Thring, saw music as integral to school life. He employed as music master Paul David, son of the leading German violinist Ferdinand David and friend to Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann. Joseph Joachim, one of the great 19th-century violinists, appeared at an Uppingham concert.
Sharp acquired the skills of a violinist as well as pianist. However, his parents baulked at the idea of a musical career – deemed insecure, perhaps, or too much of a ‘trade’. Unsure where his future lay after studying mathematics at Cambridge, he was packed off to Australia by his father in 1882 to sort himself out. In Adelaide, Sharp fell into legal work, but music dominated his life – as pianist-piano teacher, organist, violinist and choral conductor. He also dabbled in composition.
‘He enjoyed being away from the disapproving stare of his parents,’ observes David Sutcliffe, author of Cecil Sharp and the Quest for Folk Song and Dance. ‘Sharp wrote that his stay in Australia gave him the happiest years of his life.’ One reason for that was the friendship Sharp struck up with one Charles Marson, an Anglican clergyman. Their relationship was to prove pivotal to Sharp’s ultimate career path.
The moment that changed everything... hearing live folksong
On returning to Britain for good in 1892, Sharp adopted a multi-faceted musical life, including lecturing. A steady if modest income arrived via the role of director of studies at the Hampstead Conservatoire. Stability was also provided by marriage to the astonishingly patient and understanding Constance (Connie) Birch.
Then, the moment that changed everything – an uncanny parallel to what befell Ralph Vaughan Williams. Both had lectured on English folk song, but only in conceptual terms. Then, in 1903, each underwent a damascene experience of folk song performed ‘live’. Vaughan Williams heard septuagenarian labourer Charles Potiphar sing Bushes and Briars in Essex. Sharp’s revelatory moment came while visiting Charles Marson (also now returned home) at his Hambridge vicarage in Somerset.
As one of Sharp’s future female collaborators (and his biographer) Maud Karpeles relates, he had been ‘sitting in the vicarage garden talking to Charles Marson… 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, Cecil Sharp accompanying.’
The race to collect folk songs before they disappeared
Both Sharp and Vaughan Williams instantly grasped that there must be substantial numbers of folk songs out there which, if not gathered in, would vanish as traditional rural life withered on the vine. Both subsequently trudged and bicycled through country lanes in search of songs, or variants of those already collected.
Sharp returned repeatedly to Somerset before heading further afield. His musical priorities had utterly changed. ‘I don’t think he was disillusioned with classical music as such,’ suggests David Sutcliffe. ‘But he’d struggled to find status in that world. He just fell in love with folk music… the directness of melodies delivered by untrained singers. Here was a field in which he might really make his mark.’
Sharp’s grounding in classical music was invaluable, says Katy Spicer, artistic director of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, with which Sharp was intimately involved. ‘He was able to write down tunes swiftly, hearing all the note durations and intervals accurately. And he was good at gathering the “metadata” – information on locations, plus the professions and backgrounds of the singers.’
There was the man who couldn’t remember a song unless he was in his armchair by the fire. And the farm worker who only performed when feeding his pigs. ‘Sharp was great at winning singers’ confidence,’ says leading folk performer Brian Peters. ‘They opened up to him. He was then able to return and collect still more songs.’
Cecil Sharp - generating publicity and a sense of mission
Sharp would be surprised, perhaps, at research which has shown only around 20 per cent of the songs he collected date from before 1800, as folk music archivist par excellence Steve Roud (archives.vwml.org) explains. ‘The vast majority of songs had been spread around the country on “broadsides” – cheap song-sheets sold in the streets and at fairs. However, the music wasn’t printed, so every potential singer needed to learn the tune by ear – the street sellers sang the songs – or fit the words to an existing tune, or make up their own melody. In fact, it was tunes that mainly interested Sharp and Vaughan Williams, given that they’d been moulded by generations of singers and were therefore more authentically of “the people’s taste” than the words.’
Sharp never claimed to be the pioneer collector, given the long history of published selections of folk/country songs. Among Victorian/Edwardian collectors, Lucy Broadwood and the Revd Sabine Baring-Gould stand out. What Sharp brought uniquely into play, says Roud, was ‘his sense of mission and enormous energy. And he brought the folk music movement the publicity it needed’. That publicity came in the shape of articles, lectures and published collections of Sharp’s (deliberately unembellished) arrangements of folk songs, with special attention given to promoting the singing of them in schools.
A unique tonal language to strengthen the nation's character
Insofar as these songs were largely collected in rural settings, enthusiasts like Sharp felt they reflected a community significantly less smitten by change than the burgeoning, melting-pot urban centres. And the various scales in which the songs were often sung – ‘modes’, like those in Tudor church music – had the whiff of distant antiquity about them which suggested they represented the very fibre of the nation’s history. The likes of Sharp, Holst and Vaughan Williams, says Brian Peters, ‘were struck by melodies that didn’t conform to the conventional major and minor scales. When you hear a song for the first time in, say, the Dorian mode, it sounds strange. But that was the appeal.’
‘The leading role of continental music, particularly by German composers, and the jibe that England was “das Land ohne Musik” (the land without music), was keenly felt by English composers,’ observes Julia Bishop of the University of Sheffield, ‘but now there seemed to be a new way forward. Even though modal folk songs were in the minority of those collected by the likes of Vaughan Williams and Sharp, they offered the potential for a different tonal language for English music.’
Moreover, Sharp asserted that singing folk songs in schools would ‘refine and strengthen the national character’. ‘The mood was ready for this folk song revival,’ says David Sutcliffe. ‘Ordinary people sensed the need for renewal after the shortcomings exposed by the Boer War. The desire to promote an English “national music” was one outcome of that.’
A new interest in English folk dance
From 1907, Sharp’s attention was captured by English folk dance. The almost feverish collecting began all over again – this time, of both music and steps. ‘These dances and their music were also in danger of disappearing,’ observes Steve Roud. ‘Sharp and another enthusiastic collector, Mary Neal, really were doing pioneering work. It was so exciting for Sharp to discover a totallynew field of activity like this.’ Hundreds of melodies were ‘saved’.
Here was further scope for Sharp’s classical music training, says David Sutcliffe. ‘His skills on the violin equipped him to collect 222 fiddle tunes for Morris and country dances. No other collector ventured upon this territory. The English traditional fiddler has historically been neglected.’
A move to America
There was nonetheless a glorious swansong as far as Sharp’s folk song collecting was concerned. While teaching/lecturing in the US during the First World War, he was approached by one Olive Campbell, who had been taking down songs in the Appalachian Mountains.
Would Sharp develop this work? He would indeed, and duly returned to the States several times on collecting expeditions, believing (essentially wrongly, as it turned out) that he was tapping into a lingering English folk song tradition.
Cecil Sharp - an astonishing legacy
Space doesn’t permit extended coverage of the various criticisms that have been slung Sharp’s way over the years: alleged misogynistic and fascist tendencies, for example. Little stands up to serious scrutiny and in any case at Sharp’s centenary we might think it more gracious (with apologies to Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar) to praise him rather than bury him. According to the musicologist Richard Sykes, by the time of his death in June 1924, a musical folk culture was firmly embedded in the British national psyche, largely thanks to the man whose legacy amounts to getting on for 5,000 collected songs and tunes.
Folk performers have fulsomely tapped into that legacy, but Julia Bishop believes Sharp the thinker remains neglected in academic circles: ‘Especially in his book English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, Sharp made in-depth musical observations about these folk melodies which deserve greater exploration.’
Meanwhile, interest in the great man’s song/melody archive at Cecil Sharp House in London is thriving, says Katy Spicer, via both live events and a fulsome online offering. ‘Our website receives around a quarter of a million hits a year. We get visitors from a variety of creative fields, including classical musicians – looking for inspiration and finding it in Sharp’s work.’