Bluegrass Messengers

Cecil Sharp in Somerset-- David Harker 1972

Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Conclusions
by David Harker
Folk Music Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1972), pp. 220-240
English Folk Dance + Song Society

[Not finished proofing- Harker's style seems to be intentionally aimed at attacking the established figures of folk song while making the attack seem to be unbiased and based on fact. He also authored "Fakesong." Although, in many cases such attacks are warranted-- folk song collecting needs to be examined in a historical perspective, the perspective of collecting in 1900. Sharp may have edited a few texts but his was not his habit. His skill at transcribing melody should not be underestimated and I'm sure he had no agenda as far as who he got his folk song from and where. Harker's bias is obvious in his conclusion:

 There you have it, "folk song" as mediated by Cecil Sharp, to be used as "raw material" or "instrument", being extracted from a tiny fraction of the rural proletariat and to be imposed upon town and country alike for the people's own good, not in its original form, but, suitably integrated into the Conservatoire curriculum, made the basis of nationalistic sentiments and bourgeois values. [Harker's over-the-top summation- last paragraph]

A rebuttal in Sharp's defense is offered at the end by Leslie Shepard. 

R. Matteson 2016]

 Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Conclusions
 DAVID HARKER

 WHO WAS CECIL SHARP, anyway? It depends which of the three biographies and four editions of Conclusions you've read[1].

He was born at Denmark Hill in London in 1859. His father was a city slate-merchant, and his mother the daughter of a city lead-merchant. Cecil was the third child of nine and the eldest boy. When he was 8 he was sent to a private school in Brighton. Two years later, he went to Uppingham, the only English Public School with music on the Curriculum-his parents were fond of Handel and Mozart. Five years after that, he was transferred to George Heppel's "coaching establishment for the Army and University" (Cecil being intended for the former) at Weston-super-Mare in Somerset. Here he passed the Cambridge Local Exam, concentrating on mathematics, before being passed on to the Rev. J. T. Sanderson's at Royston to be coached for Clare College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1879, being then almost 20.

At Cambridge he read mathematics, and took the first part of the Mus.Bac. examinations. He rowed keenly in the second boat, lived in Tennis Court Road because of the noise of his piano, and became secretary of the College Debating Society on the third attempt,[2] proposing annually (and unsuccessfully) that the House of Lords be abolished. He soon became involved with the University musical societies, worshipped Wagner with the best of them, helped to get up "People's Concerts", and sang in the Trinity Concordia. Here, and at Dr James Kingston Barton's At Homes in South Kensington (whither his parents had gone to live in 1870, 7 years before his father's retirement at 50), Cecil met Bernard Shaw, Henry J. Ford, W. H. Wing, Charles Hayden Coffin, Edward D. Rendall and Sir Owen Seaman. In this society,
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 he was esteemed "a Freethinker . . . and a Radical", but one whose "views seemed to be founded not on the deeps but on the shallows". In 1882, he took a Third Class Hons.,[3] and was sent off with a fare paid and a few pounds to seek his fortune by his well-to-do father. Carefully securing introductions from influential acquaintances, Sharp chose to go to Adelaide because of the Beethoven song of that name. Here he cleaned cab-wheels, clerked and typed at a bank, read law, and became associate to the Chief Justice of South Australia, by 1884. By that time, he was assistant organist at the Cathedral (where he also conducted the Choral Society), Hon. Director of the Adelaide String Quartet (to which he appointed, from the music-loving German community, Herr Immanuel Gottfried Reimann as pianist), and conductor of the Government House Choral Society. He could, however, get no work in England, when he returned briefly in 1886 to recuperate from typhoid at his parents' recently-acquired manor house in Weston Turville, Buckinghamshire. So, in 1889, Sharp and Reimann set up a commercial music college, the former supplying the "connexion" and the latter the cash. Within a year the venture was a success, but, on returning from England after a visit in 1891, Sharp found that Reimann, my late partner, has turned out a scoundrel, and in league with the two men I brought from Germany has succeeded in ousting me from the College. Bang goes three years hard work and all my interest. It is hard as one grows old to preserve any faith in human nature. I have a sort of feeling that I should like to stay to oppose these German pigs and beat them, but after all such revenge is a poor sort of consolation, and really hardly worth a thought. I am not the man either to enjoy a fight of that kind. I will spend blood and money in the cause of an idea but to fight for personal and material superiority is not worth anything, and is repugnant to me in every way[4].

By January 1892 Sharp was living permanently in London, taking private "society" pupils, lecturing at schools, playing for parties and at musical evenings, and pushing his own compositions with publishers. He believed that it was wrong to say that "the public, or a large and growing proportion of it, are not able to appreciate anything but the gutter garbage served up to them by the ballad-ticklers of the day"[5]. The "public", of course, was
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chiefly the sheet-music buying middle-class variety: the rest of the people of England and their culture was largely unknown to Sharp, as this comment-from-the-train-and-drawing-room suggaests:

   I saw some beautiful pictures at Liverpool which in other respects is the most saddening city I have ever visited. It is a good exemplification of the misery which the course of competition can produce. Miles of sordid hovels housing myriads of dirty unwashed [sic] industrial slaves whose work forsooth is to gain for England [sic] her supremacy in Commerce the mighty boast of numskull statesmen![6]

By this time, of course, Britain was slipping behind both the USA and Germany in the comnmerce league, and the "dirty washed industrial slaves" were beginning to organise themselves into unions on a large scale. Before his engagement to Constance Birch in 1893, Sharp's reading consisted mainly of Schopenhauer, Ibsen and Wagner. Afterwards--he was a vegetarian for health reasons- he read theosophy, spiritualism and Christian Socialism, no doubt influenced by Charles Marson (they'd met in Australia), an Anglo-Catholic Christian Socialist priest, and staunch opponent of the "wretched bourgeois church". Of his friend's beliefs, Sharp wrote:

 . . . the Christian Socialists are endeavouring to disseminate the grand and ideal truths of Socialism very wisely, I think, leaving these principles to take concrete form themselves. Marson thinks you should begin by measures and work back to the underlying theories. We have had many arguments on the subject. To my mind the Fabians have lost all the power they had through tacking themselves on to the Liberal Party. Socialists should keep clear of politics for there is as much or as little Socialism in the Liberals as the Conservatives.[8]

This mixture of "ideal truths" and political quietism kept Sharp out of any kind of commitment for some years, and characterizes his "Radicalism".

In 1896, Sharp was employed by Arthur Blackwood (an Adelaide acquaintance) as Principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire, a commercial music college. By this time, Sharp also taught at the Holloway College and at Ludgrove, the Eton prep-school, and he felt secure enough (in 1897) to castigate the Vice-President of
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the former, Sir Hubert Parry, over a double-booking. The committee truckled. Sharp resigned- and published the correspondence- even though he was married with two young children. In 1898, the Folk Song Society was formed in London. Sharp did not join. When, a year later, he heard and saw some out-of-work men at Headington, near Oxford, dance an out-of-season Morris in the hope of getting a few coppers, "beyond harmonizing and orchestrating" the tunes Sharp hardly knew what to do, except to go to sources of "traditional" song such as Kidson and Broadwood, and to Chappell's Popular Music. Out of this work in 1902 came A Book of British Song for Home and School (perhaps as an assurance of his right-thinking after having joined the Fabian Society, and having voiced pro-Boer sympathy at Ludgrove). Seeking a "standard of excellence" with which to influence the young (it says in the teacher's book), Sharp confined himself to those songs "which are traditional, and, being chiefly of folk origin, are of assured humanity", the "productions of the Dibdin type" being "too artificial" to rank with "the ideal folk song." Yet the inclusion of "many fine compositions which from one cause or another have fallen into disuse" isn't felt to clash with the supposed common factor of genuine and deep popularity, and neither is the doctoring work of Baring-Gould and Stokoe sufficient to render a song non-"ideal." On the contrary this compilation of militaristic, [Sharp was also a member of the Navy League], monarchistic, nationalistic and socially conservative material is offered as typically British-i.e. middle class and mainly English.

In September 1903 Sharp heard his first "folk song"- at the age of 44 he had found his mission in life, his "idea". After four years of sporadic blitz collecting, he produced English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions, a book of theory, based on his own experience, and with a propagandist intention. "Chance" he writes, "first guided my footsteps into Somerset"[9]. In fact, Charles Marson pressed his London friend to come and hear his gardener, and was instrumental not only in taking down the song-words from informants, but also in introducing Sharp to the circuit of vicars and squires in the county with whom the collector was successively armed, and from whose houses he emerged into the villages. Since 1903, Sharp continues, he had collected "fifteen hundred
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tunes. Between twelve and thirteen hundred of these . . . in Somerset, or, more accurately, in about two-thirds of that county".[10] More accurately still, he had in fact collected under 1450 tunes, only 1282 of which were collected even with a semblance of a text, as songs, of which 1099 had been found in Somerset. Ninety-nine other songs came from North Devon, and the rest were found elsewhere (some by other collectors), or have been unlocated and attributed.[11] Of the 1099 songs from Somerset, 138 came from the Blagdon-Priddy-Farrington Gurney-Chew Magna area: 231 came fromthe district enclosed by Bridgwater, Holford, Stogursey and Enmore; and 532 were found within a 6-mile radius of Kingsbury Episcopi. In short, 82 per cent of the songs from Somerset came from less than 10 per cent of the county (or over 70 per cent of the grand total). With the small area between South Molton, West Worlington and Rackenford in North Devon, 77 per cent of all Sharp's songs collected by the end of August 1907 came from four small districts totalling just over 200 square miles in area. Again, of the 1099 songs from Somerset, 275 (or 25 per cent) came from the village of Hambridge and the town of Bridgwater. With the small town of Langport, the proportion goes up to 33 per cent; and, including the small town of Somerton, and the large villages of Cannington, East Harptree, Haselbury and Huish, we find that 52 per cent of Sharp's Somerset songs came from eight places. From 16, he got 67 per cent, from 26, 80 per cent, from 42, 90 per cent, and from 49, 96 per cent. The towns of Taunton, Yeovil, Sherbourne, Glastonbury, Street, Chard, Shepton Mallet, Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon, and Midsomer Norton, and the cities of Bath and Bristol were left virtually untouched.

In his introduction, Sharp mentions that his pieces came from over 350 people.[12] However, one-half of the Somerset songs came from 32 human beings living in 18 towns and villages: one-third came from 13 people in 10 places; one-quarter from nine people in eight places, and one-eighth from three women, one living in Langport, and the other two in Hambridge. Louie Hooper alone
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contributed one-seventeenth. In what way can conclusions based on this experience, this narrow range of evidence, apply to Somerset, let alone England? And how was the experience gained, the evidence selected? At the basis of Sharp's theory lies his account of the "common people", who in bygone days ... formed no inconsiderable part of the population, and were fairly evenly distributed between urban and country districts. Nowadays, however, they form an exceedingly small class-if, indeed,  they can be called a class at all-and are to be found only in those country districts, which, by reason of their remoteness, have escaped the infection of modern ideas. They are the remnants of the peasantry, who originally consisted of those of the "common people" who resided in the country and subsisted on the land.[13]

Consequently, the "expression 'common people'" is used by Sharp, strictly in its scientific sense, to connote those whose mental development has not been due to any formal system of training or education, but solely to environment, communal association, and direct contact with the ups and downs of life. It is necessary that a sharp [sic] distinction be drawn between the un-educated and the non-educated. The former are the half or partially educated, i.e. the illiterate. Whereas the non-educated, or the "common people" are the unlettered whose faculties have undergone no formal training whatsoever, and who have never been brought into close enough contact with educated people to be influenced by them.[14]

To this curious account of the working people of Somerset in early 20th-century England, it seems necessary to add one or two qualifying remarks. First of all, there was no peasantry, in remnants or otherwise. English agriculture had been transformed by the Tudor enclosures, and revolutionized by those of the 18th century[15]. Even after the campaigns of Joseph Arch and the Agricultural Labourers' Union,[16] only a tiny proportion of English working men cultivated a patch of land for subsistence, and those who did were probably old people unwilling to go to the Workhouse. In Somerset, High Farming, rack-renting, machinery,
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landlordism and capitalization had transformed the social structure of the countryside into one consisting of landlords, tenant farmers, and hired, wage-earning labouring men, women and children, as anyone who took the trouble to look in Francis George Heath's books would have gathered. In 1874, Heath wrote that, as far as working people were concerned, "the very worst phase of our agricultural system . . . is to be observed in the West of England, more particularly in Somersetshire"^[17]. Un-organized even by hiring-fairs, and so unable to take advantage of the Union activity of the 1870's, the agricultural labourers of Somerset were gradually proletarianized. Wages in 1874 were only one-half or two-thirds of those in County Durham. Canon Girdlestone's migration scheme barely scratched the surface of the problem. Between 1801 and 1871, the population of Somerset increased by two-thirds-that of Lancashire multiplied by a factor of 41- and all the increase was taken up by the towns and cities, though only six unions of parishes lost population absolutely. It is, however, curious, that almost all of the towns and villages from which Sharp collected most of his songs were in decline, absolutely, in the late 19th century, and that those which weren't were affected by the railways. It is even more odd that he ventured nowhere near the small area just west of Yeovil, around Montacute, which Heath picked out as the most squalid, or up around the villages between Shepton Mallet and Midsomer Norton on the Wiltshire border which the Chartist movement affected so profoundly in the 1830's and 1840's. And as for the general question of education, by 1851, most English people lived in large towns or cities, whose educational institutions were stretched to breaking-point by the increase of population. Schools in the small towns and villages, however, expanded at a more modest rate- if they were bad, they got no worse: if they were good (and it depended on who you were and where you were) the increase could do little harm. So it was quite possible for country people to get better formal education than their town cousins even after 1871. Somerset appears to have been above the average for literacy in 1840, and Devon and Gloucester were among the best.[18]

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Then there is the matter of "remoteness". Taking the three main Somerset stamping-grounds again, we find that Bridgwater had been at the centre of an intensive farming district since the 18th century, and was also an important port for coal. Taunton, according to William Marshall,", had a market which was "one of the first in England" even in 1796, drawing trade and people from satellite towns like Somerton and Langport, and from their dependent villages, such as Hambridge and Huish. The Harptree area, of course, had enjoyed a fitful life of three or more centuries as a mining district[20] (the very house Sharp stayed in was built from mine royalties), and at no time was the Mendip country more than 10 miles from Bristol, for so long Britain's second port. According to Sharp, "folk singers" stopped being born "not later than sixty or seventy years ago--say 1840".[21] Now, it is true that the 1840's saw the arrival of the railway-Weston and Bridgwater were connected with Bristol by 1841, Taunton by 1842, and Exeter by 1844-but even before the arrival of the railway it was possible to travel from London to Devonport by turnpike in 214 hours, to go from Bristol to the capital via the Kennett and Avon Canal, or to travel from any of Somerset's many seaport towns and villages right round Britain by coaster.[22] What the railways did, in fact, was simply to revolutionize the already existing lines of economic (and therefore cultural) force. Farming, for example, was transformed. Though Somerset had supplied Bristol and Salisbury and even London with meat in the 18th century, beasts now took hours to travel the 130 miles to the capital whereas before they took nine days, the local milk trade became geared to the London market, and cheese no longer had to travel via jobbers at Weyhill, Gileshill and Reading fairs.[23]

In the last analysis, Sharp could fall back on the assertion that "The English peasant still exists, although the peasantry as a class is extinct".[24] It is then interesting to look at what we know of Sharp's chief sources and their occupations. Louie Hooper was a shirt-maker for one of the town merchants; Mrs Overd was a
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town-labourer's wife; William Nott (from Devon) and William King were both tenant farmers, and Mrs Lock was a tenant farmer's wife; Lucy White was the wife of an agricultural labourer; Tom Sprachlan was a retired soldier, and a skilled dairyman; Lewis and Vickery were retired sea-going men; Robert Parrish was a sexton, and William Spearing was a miller-not an agricultural labourer among them. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that there were no "peasants" in SW England in 1907, but only ways of seeing working men and women as "peasants". And as for the "educated people" by whom these "peasants" were supposed to be uninfluenced, it's sufficient to recall the fact that Coleridge left Bristol for Nether Stowey for better company, and to be near Thomas Poole's Book Society. Lamb, Thelwall and the Wordsworths formed part of this community,[25] Southey was brought up in Bristol, and so was Chatterton, while Ann Yearsley and John Frederick Bryant (two Bristol working-class poets) were taken up and patronized there.[26] And all this took place in 25 years, a century before Sharp's collecting.

However, basing his argument firmly on his account of the "native and aboriginal inhabitants" of "remote country districts",[27] Sharp went on to elaborate a "scientific" definition of "folk song", which he uses exclusively to denote the song which has been created by the common people, in contradistinction to the song, popular or otherwise, which has been composed by the educated.[28]

The former song is, evidently, the result of "the spontaneous and intuitive exercise of untrained faculties", while the latter "is due to the conscious and intentional use of faculties which have been especially cultivated and developed for the purpose".[29] In order to minimise (if not not to eliminate) the effect of the conscious individual human being on "folk song", Sharp elaborated the theory of "communal composition", based on three principles (Continuity, Variation and Selection), and derived from the proposition that "First of all one man sings a song, and then others
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sing it after him, changing what they do not like".[30] At what stage changing what one does not like constitutes the creation of a new song, in any cultural situation, goes undiscussed. Instead, we are told baldly that "Insistence of type must be the rule, and variation the exception".^[31] Impressively Darwinistic though this assertion may have sounded in 1907, it was still a circular argument. To assume that there is a "type" (let alone whether Sharp was capable of recognising it- "We know a folk tune when we hear it; - or we don't" according to him)^[32] is to perform an act of faith. To one acquainted with "the mental qualities of the folk",^[33] to Sharp, as he saw himself, it's sufficient to point to two apparent feats of oral transmission to establish the essential orality of the tradition. However, one of these examples involved the collecting of two versions of a tune (the words were very different) heard by two women from a touring group of professional mummers 30 years previously. It is not considered that the essential element of Continuity might lie precisely in the mummers' function. The other example consisted of the recording of a set of words which appeared to have survived by oral transmission for three hundred years since its first (?) appearance in print. That, again, the essential element of Continuity might have been in the printed form of the early (and only) broadside known to Sharp, and that the original song might well have been pinched by successive printers
throughout the centuries- as most good material certainly was- goes undiscussed. Then, while testifying himself that "The traditional singer . .. regards it as a matter of honour to pass on the tradition as nearly as possible as he received it",[33] Sharp feels able to assert that Variation is an "unconscious" process. "Singers like Mrs Overd and Mr Henry Larcombe belong to those who aid very materially the evolution of the folk-song",[35] evidently, but while insisting on the art of the songs, and on the artistry displayed in their performance, Sharp steadfastly denies the singers the social role of artists given to them by their own communities, in the backstreets of Langport and the cottages of Haselbury. Singers knew each other-Sharp himself was passed on through
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the local networks by his informants. Their communities knew them, and their active repertoires no doubt reflected not only the
individual's tastes but also those of the people for whom they sang. This was the living tradition, the complex reformulative
process of which Sharp has left us only a fragment- the ones he called "folk songs". Historically, of course, the process of
of Selection, through the making, disseminating and using of songs, was far more complicated than Sharp acknowledged- or
knew.

Of the songs collected by Sharp before Conclusions, almost one-half were versions of 102 particular pieces (even counting songs like The True Lover's Farewell and Forty Long Miles as distinct).  Forty-nine songs accounted for 31 per cent of his texts, 34 for 24 per cent, and 12 for 12 per cent. Of these 12, four have been found in similar shape on broadsides published in the SW between 1780 and 1850 (but chiefly in the 1810's and 1820's, when Sharp's "folk-singers" and their parents were learning their songs). According to Sharp, and in spite of Frank Kidson's reasonable advice[36] that the collector must know printed songs and their history thoroughly before he can possibly recognize a "folk song,"  of the broadside printers, Catnach was "the last-1835".[37] As it happens, several printers were operating in the SW before and after that date, including Elias Keys at Devonport (with retail outlets at Exeter, Truro, Newport in Wales, and Bristol), William Collard at Bristol (who also took in Pitts and Catnach sheets for distribution, and operated between 1807 and 1846),[38] T. Willey at Cheltenham, and W. Clift at Cirencester. Beyond these- possibly the major suppliers- there were Besley at Exeter, Tucker at Brigdport, Hurd at Shaftesbury, Bennett (1813-30), Bonner (1806--65), Clouter (1801-15), Major (1814-35), Shepherd (1823-5), Smith (1827-30), Storer (1805-19) and Taylor (1826-64) at Bristol, Shenton at Cheltenham, Porter at Wotton, and Fowler at Salisbury. In the Madden Collection of broadsides alone[39]- there will certainly be others elsewhere, and in chapbooks-are to be found 29 sheets from these printers which give versions of the

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songs Sharp collected in 214 variants. Seventeen of the songs in Folk Songs from Somerset have local broadside equivalents (not including songs with similar titles but differing texts, such as The Chesapeake and Shannon). Singers frequently told Sharp that they had learned a song "off a ballett"--one man had a collection of broadsides, and another said that it was easy to learn a song when he got the words, "for he could always 'guess at the tunes' "[40].

Singers knew each other's repertoires, and passed the collector on to a friend for a complete version of a particular piece, or for songs known to them only by the title. It never seems to have occurred to Sharp that to ask for old songs from old people in the early 1900's would necessarily result in the collection of pieces popular before 1850. His notebooks are full of songs about Boney and the French, Turpin, war at sea or on land, press-gangs, prostitutes and pretty girls in love with sailors and soldiers, mainly from the time of constant war between 1790 and 1815. Nor does it seem to have struck Sharp that Farmer King was one of the well-known "Mendip singing-men", that John England performed at choir suppers, or that Louie Hooper and Lucy White were the daughters of Mrs England, famous amnong singers throughout lowland Somerset, and almost certainly one of the many ballad-singers who attended the fairs, merry-makings, markets, weddings, races and dances in Somerset towns and villages, selling broadsides and singing the songs, spreading words and music like seed-corn in the country, but town-oriented for her material, for her livelihood. Such a one was Ruth Tongue's[41] "Isiah Tully", who was "much in demand at every local fair in the south-western counties . . . a leading mummer, Morrisman or Singer, his powers respectfully acknowledged", during the 1840's and 1850's. Others were the families of gypsies- the Locks, Hollands and Coopers from whom Sharp noted so many fine songs--and, on another level, Ruth Tongtue's "Aunt Loveday Blackmore", for most of her
life in demand as "a singer at supper parties" and a "fine leading diddler" at a dance, or in "kitchens and barns and harvest fields where there were no musicians". Nor was she above learning a song or two from the "ballad-singers at Taunton Market" in the 1830's and 1840's. Even in the 20th century, Miss Tongue recalled "Mr Barry", who sold songs printed (by an out-of-work typo at
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the Tramps' Lodging House in East Road, Taunton) on lavatory paper, until his death in 1911. Then there was "John Moore, the
Village Musician", described by Charles Marson[42] (after he and Sharp had quarrelled over the latter's poking his nose into the
other's business). John was brought up as an orphan in the 1810's and 1820's, joined the village choir, saved up for a fiddle and learned to play. Later, he was promoted to the place of alto, led the waits at Christmas, and made music for local parties. Lack of work drove him to the town of Glastonbury in the 1830's, but the Hungry Forties drove him back to the village, where he survived by ploughing, and by sending his wife and children out to work in the fields at stone-picking and bird-starving. Eventually, the Workhouse claimed him and his crippled legs, but he still taught the village children "their notes" for a halfpenny a week, and continued writing hymns and anthems, words and tunes, till his death in 1900.

These people were the small-timers and semi-professionals, by and large. Of the formal, cultural institutions in the SW in the
earlier 19th century we get a glimpse from Robert Dyer[43] as he records the travels around and across the counties made by fit-- up and slightly grander companies, playing the seaports and the inland centres of the region-Dartmouth, Bodmin, Penzance, Plymouth, Devonport, Launceston, Liskeard, Redruth, Cullompton, Tiverton, Taunton, Bridgwater, Barnstaple and Bridport. At Taunton, Dyer first sang Caleb Quotem, before Colman made his name with it in London (just as Haynes Bayly's I'd be a Butterfly was sung first in his native Bath), and it was clearly recognized that every actor had to undergo "the usual provincial privations" on the Devonport, Norwich, Worcester, Nottingham, York, Newcastle or other circuits, before he could become famous in London. Even 18th-century hawkers travelled methodically throughout the SW, following fairs and races. Bampfylde Moore Carew,[44] for example, played the cripple or sold Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant Killer along the "walks" of the region, through Bruton, Bristol and Cullompton, to Totnes, Brent, Dulverton, South Molton, Bridgwater and Bath, from Barnstaple to Tiverton,
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 Taunton, Blandford, Salisbury and Weymouth. There was even, in Bristol, a recognized "place of rendezvous" for "the Brothers of the Mendicant Order", in a Temple Street Inn. Mummers, also, were essentially town- and broadside-oriented for their material, and the group at Wincanton in 1839, for example, sang General Wolfe, Mistletoe Bough, John Riley, Villikens and Dinah, The Poacher's Song, and We'll Chase the Buffalo as their active repertoire.[46] If Walter Raymond, born and brought up in the SW, was amazed by the fact that "Heppell, the dogged money-making Heppell" at a village Harvest Honme "could by the waving of a German concertina express sentiments so elevated and so tender that it reduced him almost to tears", or that "the old smith was an absolute master of the tambourine", is it to be wondered at that Sharp, coming as he did from a different region, class, cultural background, and with the artistic values of middle-class London and its spiritual suburbs, should feel the need to elaborate a theory historically-untenable, but compatible with his own belief in the pastoral mindlessness of country people, the outspoken vulgarity of their town cousins, and the unspoken supremacy of his own notions about "art"? Stressing that Mrs Overd and Henry Larcombe produced "art", he goes on to assert that Such singers as these, given the right environment, would not be making shirts at 2d a dozen or cleaning out pigstyes . . . but they would be singing in public halls and minstering to the joys and needs of thousands of their fellow-creatures.[47]

(We remember, incidentally, what happened to the singing of Mattie Kay, once Sharp got her a scholarship at Hampstead, and
placed her "under" Medora Henson.) They were the adventurous members of his metaphorical flock of starling singers [48]-the
non-human image is revealing, as is the whole pre-human concept of "evolution" used earlier--whose interpretations were either accepted or refused by the equally unconscious community, and the resulting accommodation could thus be seen as being the "product of the race". But when these starling-singers had recourse to print, to the fairground, market-place, music hall, professional status, then they became town-birds, with minds of their own
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individuals: complex, unique, wilful-to be organized, feared, "educated", bullied, resisted by the upholders of the "pure" culture of the minority. Clearly, what had to be done was to sift and sieve this "folk song" (some of the work could be done before
recording), this "raw material", [49] to work on it a little, and then to assimilate the result into the "cultured" tradition of the elite. If his very "folk-singers" were "ready enough to sing music-hall ditties" (which they were "firmly convinced were the kind of thing the gentry liked": [50] the distancing of "gentry" is crucial), to learn songs from last week's local paper ("non-educated" ?), from the fly-leaf of an old book; even if "it is a well-known fact that a folk-singer attaches far more importance to the words of a song than to his tune",[51] then, no matter, the "folk" have got their priorities wrong, and it's needful that somebody like Sharp should "edit" their repertoires, the very living tradition if there is such a thing, so as to make them conform with the muzac of the Edwardian public school and conservatoire.

In the first four parts of Folk Songs from Somerset and the selection in the Journal, Sharp and Marson published 20 per cent
of the 146 songs collected in the village of Hambridge, but nine per cent of the 129 from the town of Bridgwater: ten per cent from the small town of Somerton, but the only piece found in tiny High Ham; five per cent of the 43 taken down in the large village of Cannington, but 17 per cent of the 40 from the smaller East Harptree. "The matter has nothing to do with agriculture",[52] insists Sharp, but his published material gives precedence to the small village over the larger, and that again over the town.

In the case of individual singers, Sharp and Marson published 25 per cent of Louie and Lucy's 100 songs (i.e. of their "folk
songs", for they knew 200 others), but one of Bill Bailey's 26; five of William King's 11, but none of Eliza Small's 15. The village
singer takes precedence, even allowing a generous margin for "aesthetic" value-judgments. Regionally, Sharp and Marson reduced the proportion of songs collected to songs published in both the North Mendip industrial area and in the predominantly
urban Bridgwater district (from 12 per cent to eight per cent, and
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from 20 per cent to 13 per cent respectively), but increased that proportion as regards the mainly rural area around Kingsbury
and Hambridge (from 50 per cent to 67 per cent). Consciously or unconsciously done, the shift is significant, but even as early as the first part of Folk Songs from Somerset, one year after Sharp and Marson collected their first piece, they had a very detailed conception of what did and what did not constitute a "folk song". The clapperings of the steam-binder have killed it from the harvest field; the board-school master, a perfect Herod among the Innocents, slays it in the children by his crusade against all dialect but his own, and all poems except Casablanca (type of the legal spirit). The purveyors of cheap harmoniums, singing evangelists with their unspeakable songs and solos [one recalls Marson's profession], choir-masters with their doggerel for Sunday and their clap-trap for the penny-reading, all prey upon the forsaken and persecuted remnant ... Folksong, unknown in the drawing-room, hunted out of the school, chased by the chapel deacons, derided by the middle classes, and despised by those who have been uneducated into the three R's, takes refuge in the fastnesses of tap-rooms, poor cottages,
 and outlying hamlets . . . It is the last lingering remnant of the old village life; a survival of the times when the village had a more or less independent existence, built its own church, hanged its own rogues, made its own boots, shirts and wedding rings, and chanted its own tunes.[53]

One can almost feel the itinerant church-masons, the hangmen, cobblers and goldsmiths of the towns, gyrating in their graves-
let alone the travelling musicians and ballad-singers. Of course, Sharp never denied the influence of the broadside (though he seems to pay little attention to the chapbook), but he insisted that while it "aided the popularization of the ballad", it also "tended to vulgarize it". On the subjects of popularization and vulgarizing it seems fair to compare Sharp's note-book songs with the broadside equivalents, and both with his published versions. Curiously, Sharp's first "folk song" The Seeds of Love appeared in two versions on broadsides published by Collard of Bristol, and John England's song follows one of these at points where Sharp and Marson felt free to tinker before publishing-"I was" becomes "I were" for middle-class readers, and the tighter "I'd stay" gets rendered by the pedestrian "I would wait." (It's also interesting to note that England had "scores of music hall songs", but that this "his only jewel" was learned from the hoer in the next furrow in a Dorset turnip-field.) The broadside has two verses not known or remembered by England, neither of which
------------------

strikes me as vulgar. One of them reads:

 I'll make me a posy of hyssop, no other can I touch,
 That all the world may plainly see
 I love one flower too much.
 My garden is run wild, and where shall I plant anew
 For my bed that was once cover'd with thyme
 Is all run o'er with rue.

Broadsides were evidently good enough for Sharp's star singer Henry Larcombe, for his version of Lord Bateman (in part 3) is
almost identical with a broadside by Keys of Devonport, though every verse was altered in the published text, and I have yet to see a fuller or a finer version of Sir John Barleycorn than that published by Collard of Bristol. In spite of all the "honest" disclaimers of the editors (concerning contemporary middle-class sexual hypocrisy, and what now seem like arbitrary and unnecessary alterations in grammar), subtler and unexplained shifts of emphasis creep into the published texts of songs such as Geordie. In Mrs Overd's version, and in the broadside by Smith of Bristol, it is the judge who looks down unpityingly and condemns the horse-stealer. In Sharp's published text, the judge becomes "the people", and what had been a verdict pronounced by a member of the ruling class becomes a communal condemnation merely mediated by the "public" agent. (Incidentally, in the broadside, Mrs Overd's "Bohenny" is given as "Bohemia", and her "London" as "Newcastle".) Then again-and it is possible here only to give examples of some of the things that happened, though anybody could spend an interesting couple of hours comparing after this fashion -- the published Wraggle Taggle Gipsies reduces and dehumanizes
the heroes to "ragged ragged rags", and de-lyricizes "Spanish livery" by substituting "hose of leather". More importantly, the
 wife who Mrs Overd sang of as being wholeheartedly sick of her lord and all his possessions gets rendered as a kind of unthinking shameless hussy--note particularly the shift of meaning and the connotative attitudes implied in the substitution of "I'll follow" for "I'm off".

Even in the "scientific" work for the Journal, the editors carry over emendations and interpolations made for the songbooks.
(Significantly, Sharp didn't bat an eyelid at Baring-Gould's doctored texts when he was asked to edit the music for the reprint
of Songs of the West in 1905.) On the basis of having collected

---------------------------

about 500 songs, Sharp felt able to pronounce in the Journal on "genuine folk-made traditional ballad poetry", as opposed to the many "imperfectly remembered broadside versions" he admits to having noted. (Of course, he did have Professor Child's "canon" to help him with his value-judgments, coinciding as that collection did with middle-class taste on both sides of the Atlantic.) More, Sharp felt confident enough to specify for those who would search "in the right way and in the right place", an optimum age for prospective informants. "Between sixty and seventy years is the best age, for at that time of life the singer is old enough to remember the traditional ballad, and young enough to be able to sing it". According to this estimate, "folk-singers" would have learned their songs in the 1850's and 1860's, after the coming of the railways, but, significantly, just before the rise of the first generation of provincial music halls. To Sharp, needing as he did some "distancing" hiatus between the supposed decline of broadside printing and the advent of the second generation of
 Halls, the overlapping of provincial broadside printers with early
 concert and music hall institutions would have proved something
 of a nuisance. In any case, "the tunes are of the utmost value, but
 ... the words are of less account". Accordingly, while claiming
 that "the best and most representative" were selected for part 2
 of Folk Songs from Somerset, the editors admit that the "words
 in this series have been rather more freely dealt with". In fact,
 not one song in Part I went unaltered, many had verses rewritten
 and some had composed or "vulgar" broadside verses interpolated
 as and when it suited the editors' tastes. In Part 2, this process is
 intensified in interesting ways. It is not only that anything
 approaching a sexual connotation is ruthlessly excluded or
 altered, but even a direct confrontation in As I walked through
 the Meadows is taken back from the live context into a passively
 recorded verbal exchange, and the parlour-ballad idiom of "she
 pattered along on her dear little feet" is allowed to set the whole
 tone. In The Trees they do grow high, the girl is deprived of her
 agency in putting an end to the boy's growing: the fulfilled
 relationship in the recorded Foggy Dew is scrupulously removed
 into a dream-world fantasy of adolescent wish-fulfilment; and
 mawkish sentimentality replaces active love in The Sign of the
 Bonny Blue Bell. Then again, apart from the vastly disproportion-
 ate prominence given to "Child ballads", the process of "editing"

-------------

 tends to assimilate some collected versions to a "Child-ballad"
 theme and a drawing-room sentiment. Passing over the inter-
 polated "O the ship was pixy-held" (one remembers Marson's
 penchant for faery-stories), we find
 My time be short, my time be long
 To-morrow or today
 May Christ in Heaven have all my soul
 But I'll kiss your lips of clay.
 That, to me, is sensationalism of the vulgarest order.
 Even animals are rendered impotent. Blow away the morning
 Dew no longer contains the cock that "never trode no hen".
 Instead, and characteristically the bird's frustrated potency (and
 so the man's) is altered to his being given to "cluck like any hen",
 with all the associations of effeminate impotence such a shift
 involves. And this is the "scientific" work for the Journal--else-
 where we never even get a sniff of the farmyard! Also in the Journal,
 it is patently clear that only those texts were chosen which were
 not considered naughty, but even when the "best" tune is asso-
 ciated with a sexually-motivated plot, the offending lines are
 doctored, as in Seventeen Come Sunday, or siinply left out, as in
 The False Bride. Compared to this policy, which must have been
 conscious, compared to the wrong attributing of songs, the using
 of any old broadside to patch up an unsuitable text (be they from
 1790 London or 1850 Newcastle), the collations, emendations,
 rehashings, interpolations, and amalgamations which are the
 norm rather than the exception, the supposed practices of the
 broadside publishers seem perhaps not quite so bad. They, at
 least. had no "scientific" pretensions, nor did they seek to "restore"
 some mythical "original" version, as posited (and later denied)
 by Sharp and Marson, to which they aloine held the aesthetic key.
 One recalls, at this point, that though Dicky of Taunton Dean had
 for Sharp and Marson "all the character of a genuine traditional
 ballad", for Alfred Williams the song was clearly a townsman's
 mickey-take of a caricatured country "yokel".55
 But there were other considerations operating in Sharp's mind.
 In 1906, he compiled what is in effect a precisely similarly-struc-
 tured collection of songs as that in his 1902 book, for use in
 schools. These arbitrarily selected, socially unaware, bodily
 55 see Folk Songs of the Upper Thames, p. 12.

---------
 impotent, mawkish and inane pieces of pabulum, were, however,
 now supposed to be "folk songs", that "communal and racial"51
 product and "expression in musical idiom of aims and ideals that
 are primarily national in character".5' Nor was the propagandist
 mission denied-it was rejoiced in:
 When every English child is, as a matter of course, made acquainted with
 the folk-songs of his country, then, from whatever class the musician of
 the future may spring, he will speak in the national idiom.58
 In other words, considering the recent extension of formal
 education for the overwhelmingly urban population of early 20th
 century England, what was clearly required-it hardly needed
 explaining, then-was the assimilation into the supposedly
 superior culture of the ruling class of the valuable qualities re-
 presented in some of the songs ignored by all but a few of the
 people in certain parts of the country. That there might be quali-
 ties in the other and varied cultural traditions of song active
 amongst working people throughout England for centuries never
 seems to have occurred to Sharp. How could it, with his particular
 background and fixed tastes? To him, as to others now, there
 were just two niations with separate and separable cultures, and
 there was simply no doubt as to which was the better, which ought
 to dominate. We have seen that there was precious little regional
 about what Sharp was allowed to consecrate as "folk song", let
 alone "national". What is, however, quite clear by now is that
 he was advocating the grafting onto his own class's music of
 suitably mediated musical (and not literary) values, which could
 then be offered to the children of his very "folk singers" as
 "Music" itself, capital "M" and singular. When, in 1905, the
 Board of Education had ruled that
 The songs chosen for infants should be musically as simple as possible;
 but it is not necessary that infants should understand all the words they
 sing, as the chief appeal is not to the intellect ... but through the spirit
 of the song to the unconscious mind of the child, . . .
 Sharp did not disagree in the least. Indeed, he remarked that a
 recent article on the "Teaching of Patriotism" gave him a "lively
 satisfaction, for it gives expression to views which I have for years
 56 Conclusions, p. 30.
 57 ibid, p. X.
 59 ibid, p. 133

------
 been doing my best to preach in and out of season". " He took
 issue with the Board only on the best means to reach the required
 end, to succeed in the inculcation of bourgeois values at a level
 approaching outright indoctrination. To Sharp, "folk song" was
 chiefly "a great instrument for sweetening and purifying our
 national life and for elevating the popular taste".fi0
 Flood the streets therefore with folk-tunes, and those who now vulgarize
 themselves and others by singing coarse music-hall songs will soon drop
 them in favour of the equally attractive but far better tunes of the folk.
 This will make the streets a pleasanter place for those who have sensitive
 ears, and will do incalculable good in civilizing the masses.6'
 Whose ears? Whose "civilization"? I think Sharp answers clearly
 enough.

 Our system of education is, at present, too cosmopolitan; it is calculated to produce citizens of the world rather than Englishmen. And it is Englishmen, English citizens that we want. How can this be remedied? By taking care, I would suggest, that every child born of English parents is, in its earliest years, placed in possession of all those things which are the distinctive products of its race ... The discovery of English folk-song, therefore, places in the hands of the patriot, as well as of the educationalist, an instrument of great value. The introduction of folk-songs into our schools will not only affect the musical life of England; it will also tend to arouse that love of country and pride of race the absence of which we now deplore.[62]

 There you have it, "folk song" as mediated by Cecil Sharp, to be used as "raw material" or "instrument", being extracted from a tiny fraction of the rural proletariat and to be imposed upon town and country alike for the people's own good, not in its original form, but, suitably integrated into the Conservatoire curriculum, made the basis of nationalistic sentiments and bourgeois values. The working people of England rejected, and still have to reject, as children, "folk song" as official culture. In
fact, of course, they'd rejected it in its original state before Sharp was born, by creating the first generation of music halls, but that story belongs to history, and not to the analysis of myth.

Footnotes:

1.  Cecil Sharp OUP 1933, by A. H. Fox-Strangways, is used in this article. (All biographical information derives from this book, unless otherwise noted). Revised editions appeared in 1955 and 1967. English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions was first published in 1907, by Sharp. This edition is used and quoted from here, in preference to those published after his death-i.e. in 1936, 1955 and 1965,-because it contains material of importance omitted from the others.
2 Sharp correspondence, Cecil Sharp House. Thanks to Librarians David Bland and Mrs. Noyes for their co-operation.
3 Sharp correspondence.
4 ditto.
5 ditto.
6 Sharp correspondence.
7 see: For Christ and the People, by S. Yeo, K. Leech, M. B. Reckitt, and R. Woodfield, London, 1968.
8 Sharp correspondence.
9 Conclusions (1907) p. viii
10 ibid, pp. viii and ix.
11 Information derived from an analysis of Sharp's Clare College note-books up to 31st August 1907. Thanks to the College Librarian, to Mrs Kratochvil, and to her assistant.
 12 Conclusions, p.
 13 ibid p.4.
 14 ibid pp. 3-4.
 15 see, for example, Lord Ernle's English Farming Past and Present (6th ed.,
 1961), and The Agricultural Revolution 1750-1880, J. D. Chambers and
 G. E. Mingay, London, 1966.
 16 see Joseph Arch, his autobiography, London, 1898
  17 The English Peasantry, by Francis George Heath, London, 1874. By the
 time of his British Rural Life and Labour, London, 1911, the title-change
 underlines the middle classes' change in attitude towards country working
 people.
 18 see Industry and Empire, by E. J. Hobsbawm, Harmondsworth,
 19 Rural Economy of the West of England, 1796.
 20 see J. W. Gough, The Mines of Mendip, Newton Abbot, 1967.
 21 Conclusions, p. 119.
 22 see D. St J. Thomas, The Regional History of the Railways of Great
 Britain, West Country, 1960.
 23 see General View of the Agriculture of the County of Somerset, by John
 Billingsley, 1794.
 24 Conclusions, p. 119.
 25 see Life of S. T. Coleridge, by Hanson, 1938.
 26 see Ann Yearsley's Poems, 1785; J. F. Bryant's Poems, 1787, and also
 Southey's Essay on The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (ed.
 J. S. Childers, London, 1925).
 27 Conclusions, p. 1.
 28 ibid p. 3.
 29 ibid p. 4
  30 ibid p. 10.
 31 ibid p. 16.
 32 ibid p. 87.
 33 ibid p. 16.
 34 ibid p. 17. [missing in text]
 35 ibid p. 23
 36 Letter to Sharp from Kidson, Sharp correspondence.
 37 Sharp's Lecture-notes, Cecil Sharp House.
 38 For these dates, and for those of the other Bristol printers, I am indebted
 to the Chief Librarian, Bristol Public Libraries.
 39 In Cambridge University Library.
40 Sharp correspondence and Lecture-notes.
41 see The Chime Child, 19
42 see Village Silhouettes, 1914.
 43 see Nine Years of an Actor's Life, London, 1833.
 44 see The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew, London, 1745, 176-, 1785, 1793, 1812, and 1931.
 45 see S. R. Littlewood, Somerset and the Drama, 1922.
 46 see English Country Life, 1910.
 47 Report of Sharp lecture in Somerset County Gazette, 21/5/1904.
 48 Conclusions, p. 30.
 49 Sharp Lecture-note.
 50 ditto.
 51 Conclusions, p. 18.
 52 Interview of Sharp by Musical Herald, 1/12/1905.
 53 Folk Songs from Somerset, p. xi.
 54 Conclusions, p. 101.
 59 Letter to Morning Post in Sharp's correspondence.
 60 Sharp interview in Morning Post 19/4/1906.
 61 Conclusions, p. 137.
 62 ibid, pp. 135-6.
 [This article was originally given as a paper to the Leeds University Institute
 of Dialect and Folklife Studies, at the invitation of the Director, Mr. Stewart
 Sanderson.]

______________________________________

Cecil Sharp (Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1972, pp. 220-240)
by Leslie Shepard
Folk Music Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1973), pp. 318-319
Published by: English Folk Dance + Song Society

 Mr LESLIE SHEPARD writes:
 As one who argued the importance of the despised broadsides and chap books many years before the subject became fashionable, I welcomed David Harker's endorsement. I deeply regretted, however, that it should be in a context of almost wilful denigration of Cecil Sharp, whose gallant battle to get simple beautiful country songs into the die-hard conservative school curriculum of his day was presented as a tyranny of "nationalistic sentiments and bourgeois values"--almost as if Sharp
were a dictator imposing a dogmatic little red book upon the proletariat!

Sharp was no middle-class chauvinist, and of the 78 items in his early work A Book of British Song (hardly typical of his later position), only 11 are "National Songs" like Rule Britannia and The Roast Beef of Old England (surely a liberal choice for a
vegetarian!), and amongst these are The Shan Van Vocht and The Wearing of the Green. Much that was truly revolutionary in Sharp's day may now seem tame, but the efforts of all innovators must be measured against the temper of their times, and if we benefit from their pioneer researches it is unjust to damn them for not being born in a different period.

Mr Harker has grossly misrepreented Sharp's good taste, broad-mindedness and courage in an age of bourgeois values. To me there seems something peculiarly bourgeois in twisting Sharp's interesting analogy about "a flight of starlings" into an evidence of dehumanization, or in scoring points by attributing sinister "middle-class" motives to the alteration of "I was" to "I were" and "I'd stay" to "I would wait". Sharp's inevitable concessions to prim taste in printed versions (as Baring-Gould and others) is outbalanced by the preservation of original notebooks for specialized study; today there would be little problem in publishing
unaltered texts, particularly bawdy ones. Sharp's English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions was published on his own account, since he could not find a publisher; the book was written in ill-health and partial blindness. He referred to it modestly: "It is not much of a book, but it contains something that should be said; and although I realize that I have said it all very clumsily, yet on
 the whole I think it should be said so rather than not at all."

Mr Harker's satirical tone is in sharp contrast, and his breathless presentation of highly selective data and out-of-context quotation only obscures the real Sharp and expresses the writer's own prejudices. I cannot
 accept that it was "bourgeois" of
 Sharp to respond to the beauty of
 songs like The Trees they do grow
 high, The True Lover's Farewell, The
 Seeds of Love, and Geordie, whatever
 their versions or ultimate origins, nor
 in his desire to share that beauty
 with other people. There was no
 condescension in Sharp's genuine
 appreciation of working-class rural
 singers. It is arguable that dehuman-
 ization began with the urban culture
 of the industrial revolution, and that
 the broadsides of country songs were
 less popular than gallows literature
 in the towns and cities. The mere
 popularity and professionalism of the
 music-hall period is no valid criter-
 ion of value. Mr Harker's own
 terminology in calling country singers
 and musicians "small-timers and
 semi-professionals" is peculiarly
 insensitive. And what is the relevance
 of Charles Marson's village musician
 John Moore, who had no real connection with folk songs, broad-
 side or otherwise (see Village Sil-
 houttes, p. 6)?

 Much that could be valuable in
 Mr Harker's survey is vitiated by his
 doctrinaire name-calling. The idea of
 regional folk music is now dis-
 credited, but one could hardly blame
 Sharp, whose spare-time collecting
 was unsponsored and did not have
 the advantage of later collections
 and systematic analysis. The theory
 of communal folk song creation was
 not Sharp's own invention, but the
 currently accepted view of the most
 esteemed scholars before and during
 Sharp's lifetime. The concept of
 broadsides as "corrupt" versions of
 traditional songs was also generally
 accepted. Today, students with rela-
 tively unlimited research facilities and
 access to a wealth of great collections
 are in a position to modify these
 views, but they should beware of
 creating new dogmas. Whatever the
 function of broadside poets, many
 folk song themes and types derive
 from great antiquity, often passing
 through oral to printed tradition and
 back to orality, and Sharp himself
 was prepared to accept that Henry
 Larcombe's Robin Hood ballad may
 have been an oral tradition from a
 seventeenth-century broadside (Some
 Conclusions, p. 17). Sharp's definition
 of "communal action" as opposed to
 "communal origin" (Some Conclu-
 sions p. 31) deserves closer study.
 Of course, every generation of
 scholarship revises and modifies
 earlier pioneer work-this is itself
 something of a folk process. But
 before we pour scorn on the social
 idealists of the nineteenth and early
 twentieth century we might ponder
 the modern mass media exploitation
 and shallow bourgeois politics that
 have superseded their efforts. Today's
 status quo of pop culture involves a
 large capital investment and a lowest
 common denominator of taste, the
 end result of the very tendencies that
 Sharp and others deplored at an
 connection with folk songs, broad-
 side or otherwise (see Village Sil-
 houttes, p. 6)?

 Much that could be valuable in
 Mr Harker's survey is vitiated by his
 doctrinaire name-calling. The idea of
 regional folk music is now dis-
 credited, but one could hardly blame
 Sharp, whose spare-time collecting
 was unsponsored and did not have
 the advantage of later collections
 and systematic analysis. The theory
 of communal folk song creation was
 not Sharp's own invention, but the
 currently accepted view of the most
 esteemed scholars before and during
 Sharp's lifetime. The concept of
 broadsides as "corrupt" versions of
 traditional songs was also generally
 accepted. Today, students with rela-
 tively unlimited research facilities and
 access to a wealth of great collections
 are in a position to modify these
 views, but they should beware of
 creating new dogmas. Whatever the
 function of broadside poets, many
 folk song themes and types derive
 from great antiquity, often passing
 through oral to printed tradition and
 back to orality, and Sharp himself
 was prepared to accept that Henry
 Larcombe's Robin Hood ballad may
 have been an oral tradition from a
 seventeenth-century broadside (Some
 Conclusions, p. 17). Sharp's definition
 of "communal action" as opposed to
 "communal origin" (Some Conclu-
 sions p. 31) deserves closer study.
 Of course, every generation of
 scholarship revises and modifies
 earlier pioneer work-this is itself
 something of a folk process. But
 before we pour scorn on the social
 idealists of the nineteenth and early
 twentieth century we might ponder
 the modern mass media exploitation
 and shallow bourgeois politics that
 have superseded their efforts. Today's
 status quo of pop culture involves a
 large capital investment and a lowest
 common denominator of taste, the
 end result of the very tendencies that
 Sharp and others deplored at an
 earlier stage of development. Today's
 widespread folk club movement is as
 much a healthy spontaneous reaction
 against imposed pseudo-culture and
 pop politics as Sharp's appreciation
 of folk music. If there is some mytho-
 logy involved in the vanishing rural
 ethos, at least one cannot deny its
 beauty, emotional maturity, good
 manners, and tolerance, to which
 writers like Marson, Sharp and
 others attested.