Cecil Sharp in America Evelyn K. Wells
by Evelyn K. Wells
Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Dec., 1959), pp. 182-185
CECIL SHARP IN AMERICA
BY EVELYN K. WELLS
AT A RECENT meeting of the Boston Centre of the Country Dance Society some of our older members reminisced about their first encounters with English song and dance, often through contact with Cecil Sharp on his American visits. If I could play you the tape recording made that evening, you would have a picture in little of Sharp's impact on America-a lively reconstruction of the already vivid American chapters in the Life of Cecil Sharp.[1]
Our talk about the early schools, the festivals, the lectures, the Appalachian visits, and the collaboration with dramatic producers reflected the spread of enthusiasm through the country, as the contagion caught on in Buffalo, in Pittsburgh, in Cincinnati and St. Louis and Chicago and Toronto, to say nothing of New York and Boston. There were anecdotes about the man and his matter, as well as longer accounts by his first helpers, notably Lily Roberts Conant, who came from England to take over some of his rapidly increasing work, and who has ever since played a role of first importance here as teacher, mentor, and present Honorary President of the Country Dance Society.
That evening started us remembering more first impressions. At the mention of Sharp's name in a chance conversation someone quite unconnected with folk song says, 'Oh, I never missed a chance to go and hear him talk!' Mrs. Conant tells of
Sharp, housed with some indisposition at the Storrow home, and hence perforce a guest at a dinner Mr. Storrow was giving for Harvard men at their twenty-fifth reunion, charming with the liveliness and wide range of his conversation a group whose interests, certainly at the moment, were far away from English songs and dances.
Mrs. Conant recalls, too, his mock disapproval of her new Americanisms when she once greeted him at the door with 'Come right in!' A pianist at an early school describes her amazement and amusement on an occasion when she felt other fingers than hers taking over the keyboard, and realized that she was being gently pushed off the piano stool as Sharp took over, without the loss of a note and with the resulting magical lift he always gave the music. A well-known organist, presently director of a music school, remembers most clearly 'Mr. Sharp playing the piano, and the really wonderful arrangements that he made of those marvellous tunes'.
I remember his saying once as I met him in a longways dance, 'I like these dances; they give me a chance to say how-do-you-do to everyone'. Perhaps the most frequent comment is on the extraordinary power of a man who was himself no dancer or singer, to communicate by the smallest gesture or movement, the spirit of a dance, or by the merest indication in his singing, the beauty of a song. Nobody in that first group at Pine Mountain who dropped their work in the kitchen and the garden to learn
'Peascods' and 'Rufty Tufty' and 'Black Nag' in the middle of a hot summer day, as Sharp taught and Maud Karpeles hummed the tune, will ever forget the new world it opened out for us; nor the quiet, natural way in which he sang for the whole school family as we sat around the supper tables in the twilight, the songs he had found, perhaps that very day a few miles up or down the valley.
And wherever he was and however occupied, he kept up a lively correspondence. You usually got a reply to your letter by return mail. From some of these letters to Mrs. Conant, which were unavailable at the time the book was being written, she has
kindly allowed me to quote. Here are bits of discouragement and elation, of exhaustion and persistence, of humour, irritation, philosophic acceptance, and (along with the deepest appreciation of friendly hospitality) some shrewd analysis of American ways.
Thus:
After a dance show in New York:
'A Basquem usician,a veryf irst-ratem an, saw us dancei n the moming and I. (Isadora) Duncan's girls in the evening ... Our show made it quite impossible for him, he said, to look at the vapid movements of the Duncanites.'
'Devising dances is great fun. I have just done one for the Satyrs' Dance in The Winter's Tale which would amuse you tremendously.'
A fellow passenger on shipboard nicknamed him 'Chanticleer because I am a sort of Cock of the Walk, and I have been collecting chanteys every day from an old sailor man on board.'
'In this country they like people with a name-indeed name rather than substance ... (But) when a real interest has been aroused people will be keen about getting the knowledge.'
And again, after a school which was badly attended:
'I am quite satisfied that there will never be more than a very few people in America who will care to give the necessary time to becoming proficient. In this country they like quick change and quick results.'
And of the rocking-chair ladies at resort hotels:
'Virginia-and to a less extent America generally-would be to me so much more pleasant a place to travel in if the inhabitants leamed to talk quietly.'
But after
'some terrible roughing, both as regards food, lodging, and travelling ... the results of our work are so wonderful that it would have been worth it to have paid a far heavier price. I cannot describe the beauty of the tunes I have collected, and indeed many of the sets of words I have taken down. I have noted 250 tunes now [later the number climbed astronomically] but it is the quality rather than the number which is so amazing.'
This revival of memories takes one back to the different world of those first war years. The American visits could never have taken place during the second war, with its greater travel restrictions and America's longer and completer involvement. There
were the frequent Atlantic crossings with their wartime hazards (once just missing passage on the last trip of the Lusitania). There was greater variety of contact than would have been possible in late years-through fashionable gatherings for concerts
and lectures, through university professors and theatrical producers and organizations, notably the Russell Sage Foundation and its Director, John M. Glenn.
There was the physical strain of travel, hotel life, and, in the Appalachians, often the most uncomfortable conditions. (In 1955, when I was driving in comfort with Maud Karpeles over the good mountain roads, she often reminded me that these were dirt
tracks, which they walked on foot in 1916.) There was constant anxiety about finances, constant battle with illnesses. Above all, there was the emotional strain of projecting the dances and songs against the haunting background of tragic news from home.
'I must go back to England', Sharp kept saying to Mr. and Mrs. Campbell. And in one letter, 'The war engrosses our thoughts. I do not know what I should do were it not for definite work day by day which forces my mind away from Flanders'.
Pioneering has its discouragements, but it has its rewards, and no doubt Sharp's sense of the ripeness of the time for work in America was a sustaining force. The cultural roots of America which he laid bare need no more than implicit comment here, and an Englishman's recollection of Sharp in America may be enlightening as well as amusing. Last spring a fellow guest in a hotel where I was staying in the Cotswolds, hearing that I had been to Bampton on Whit Monday, began to tell me that I should have known Cecil Sharp, whom he had once met. 'You should see his Appalachian book', he said. 'Why, do you know, he found our English songs in America!'
Sharp, I think, would have agreed with a mountain woman whose words I have been reading recently. Echoing Mrs. Hogg, she says, 'They (ballads) belong to be sung, not put down in writing. But iffen you don't trust your recollection, then I reckon you've a bound to write them down'. And in the metaphor of the looma realistic one for her: 'In a few years' time learning will be all wove into the pattern us mountain folks lives by. But the old-time ways will keep on making the main figure of the pattern'.[2]
'The main figure of the pattern' is increasingly plain, as the pendular swing of appraisal of Sharp's work has gone from high praise to reservations sometimes caustic and back again. The comment is sometimes made that his attention was so hard to
divert from the matter in hand that he often missed valuable matter. Mrs. Jane Gentry's 'Jack Tales', for instance. But though he knew they were there, he left their collecting to others, while he concentrated on her songs. Collectors, teachers and
lecturers in the field of folk tunes well know how often they must turn away the importunate enthusiast. Sharp wasted no time on the spurious, but he instantly responded to anything of genuine quality.
A line or two from Mrs. Campbell's papers (not included in the account of the famous interview given in the book) brings to life still more sharply this special quality: 'His eager, critical eye flashed over the first (tune). He hummed the melody-it was "Little Musgrove and Lady Barnard", I think ... He turned to another and another and another-"Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight", "The Cruel Mother", "The Douglas Tragedy", "The Little Ship's Carpenter", "Barbara Allen". I sat meantime watching him turn the leaves, quiet except as I answered an occasional question or interpreted a melody when he called upon me. "No, No, it isn't so bad!" he answered to a regretful apology on my part.' It is the mixture of this intense single-mindedness and the instant and compelling response to the unexpected but immediately recognized as significant that has given us to-day Sharp's increasingly important body of song, dance, and criticism. The American travels are a continuing example of this response-to the challenge of dramatic choreography in the dances of Granville Barker's Midsummer Night's Dream and Winter's Tale or the English interlude for Percy MacKaye's Caliban; to the cancelling of a lecture tour to collect in the mountains; to the pursuit of the
Kentucky Running Set, once he had been exposed to an actual performance. The imagination set on fire by 'Laudnum Bunches' danced at Headington and 'The Seeds of Love' sung by a Somerset gardener was likewise kindled bylthe new and stimulating
American opportunities.
['When the transcriber has the ear, the skill, and the wide knowledge of a Cecil Sharp, the single approximation is more useful for comparative and historical inquiry than a more exact picture of a single rendition, stanza by stanza, with plus and minus signs suggesting sharpened flats and flattened sharps at particular notes on that particular occasion, and with all the other details of a meticulous record.'
'These men, and Cecil Sharp, must by their individual efforts have amassed in the aggregate easily half of all that was gathered in the first quarter of the present century. Indeed, it is unlikely that Cecil Sharp's contribution, assisted in life and faithfully carried forward after his death by his tireless co-worker, Maud Karpeles, will ever be approached. The magnitude and extraordinary versatility of his talents and accomplishments put him as far above competition in British Folk-Song and Dance
as Child is in his own separate demesne. There has never been a collector with such quickness and tact in seizing and accurately reporting essential melodic characteristics from individual singing. His copy strikes a mean between the typical and idiosyncratic that is almost ideal.'
'The vertebrate column of this work is that portion of Cecil J. Sharp's vast collection which belongs among the Child ballads. Without the free use of Sharp's variants there would have been little use in pursuing my task. The absence of so large, so trustworthy, so essential a portion of the extant record would have been absolutely crippling. My debt, therefore, to those responsible for the Sharp MSS and their publication is impossible to overstate.'
From The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, Vol. 1. By Bertrand Harris Bronson, 1959. Introduction.]
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1 By A. H. Fox Strangways and Maud Karpeles, O.U.P. 2nd ed. 1955.
2 Tales from Cloud-Walking Country by Marie Campbell, p p. 14, 13. Bloomington, Ind., Univ. of Indiana Press, 1959.