f36 Appalachian Gold


It was a century ago this year that Cecil Sharp & Maud Karpeles headed for the hills. Brian Peters looks back at their epic song collecting adventure.


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t was 100 years ago, on June 25th, 1916, that Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles journeyed from New York City to Asheville, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Get-


ting there was hard: over two days’ jour- ney by train, with tracks washed away by floods, followed by a hair-raising mountain road trip. Cecil, a meticulous diarist, wrote drily: “Despite the heat, the dust, the lack of food, the swarms of flies, hay fever, asthma, etc, it was a wonderful trip.” These two denizens of genteel London society were about to experience a huge culture shock. Far from the classical music circles and the well-heeled pupils of subur- ban England that Sharp was accustomed to, what lay ahead were the rough log cabins of the mountain people, the rugged trails that led to them, and the squalid small- town hostelries where the two explorers would spend many a miserable night.


They came in search of old ballads, brought over to North America by migrants from the British Isles 150 years earlier, and still flourishing in remote mountain commu- nities. Sharp – the acknowledged expert on English traditional song and dance – had heard about them while visiting the USA in 1915 to earn badly-needed cash, lecturing and working as dance adviser for a produc- tion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One


Mary Sands


evening he was approached by a woman carrying a sheaf of ballads she’d collected while her husband was working in deprived Appalachian schools. Unsure what recep- tion she might receive from the great man – who had an intimidating reputation – Olive Dame Campbell was delighted to find him immediately interested. Sharp could see this was good stuff, and decided straightaway to head for the hills.


With a wealthy benefactor in Boston secured, Sharp’s young disciple Maud Karpeles enlisted as secretary, and Olive Campbell’s husband John making contacts in the mountains, the adventure got under way the following year. Lodgings were found with local missionaries (the mountain people were deemed in urgent need of sal- vation) who would arrange meetings with known singers in the area. Rather ironic, since the preachers and evangelists were doing their best to discourage their flocks from singing the old secular ballads – ‘Love Songs’, as they were called – and stick to hymns instead.


Cecil and Maud didn’t fancy travelling on muleback, so the only way to track down singers in distant settlements was to walk. And walk they did, over mile after mile of rough tracks, often in searing heat and drip- ping humidity, clambering up steep moun- tainsides and tottering over creeks on frighteningly narrow log bridges. It wasn’t uncommon for them to trudge fifteen miles or more in a day – quite an ask, since Sharp was 57 (in those days, that was pretty vener- able) and asthmatic. Sometimes it was a wasted journey; sometimes, they struck gold. During that first foray into Madison County, a remote corner of North Carolina near the Tennessee border, they met Mary Sands (“a prize folksinger”, according to Sharp), who over several days gave them 25 songs, most- ly British in origin. Three weeks later they were introduced to the remarkable Jane Gentry, celebrated locally as a storyteller and singer, who yielded 70 songs to the songhunters’ pencils and notebooks. Yes, pencils: carrying a phonograph recorder would have been impossible on those tracks, and Sharp preferred to trust his ear anyway. You can see those very notebooks, and Sharp’s diary, in the Vaughan Williams Library at Cecil Sharp House.


The collectors were thrilled with the material they were finding. Ballad after bal- lad, familiar from the Child collection but often virtually extinct in Britain, were reeled off by mountain people for whom they


were not just antiquities from the ancestral homeland, but gripping tales to chill the blood or warm the heart on a winter’s night. The tunes were often exceptional, and Sharp was overjoyed to find that even young children and teenagers knew the songs – in England he’d often relied on the memories of the elderly and infirm. Sharp concluded that the people he met, very poor but self-sufficient and healthy, were the descendants of “yeoman farmers”, who represented a kind of living museum of 17th Century England. Wrong but Romantic!


of Kentucky, a more difficult hunting ground, where the exotic foreigners were suspected, bizarrely, of being German spies. Sharp was in atrocious health, suffering fevers, dysentery, suspected typhoid, and toothache so bad that a local dentist extracted six front teeth in one nightmarish sitting. His vegetarianism – in territory where staple foods were routinely fried in hog’s fat – forced him to subsist on crackers and grapes, adding to the misery. During the worst of his fevers Maud was obliged to camp out nightly on his bedroom floor, sponge in hand to mop his fevered brow. (Were Cecil and Maud ever closer than mere colleagues, as prurient opinion claims? No one who’s studied the subject takes that one seriously!)


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Throughout it all, Sharp carried on his work with fanatical enthusiasm, insisting that singers be brought even to his sickbed. A third trip, to Virginia and back to North Carolina in 1918, brought the total number of songs to over 1,600 – a hugely impressive figure. It was left to Maud, without whose unstinting support Sharp would never have lasted the course, to edit the haul for publi- cation in two volumes after her mentor’s early death aged 65. She retained his pre- ferred title, English Folk Songs From The Southern Appalachians.


Some readers may by this point be struggling to square the heroic picture I’ve painted of the man in the white hat, with what they think they know about Cecil Sharp. He’s been branded thief and bowd- leriser of working class culture, exploiter of poverty-stricken country folk, bully, racist, neo-fascist and worse. Opinions have see- sawed wildly, from the unquestioning adu- lation of the folk movement for years after


hat trip to the backwoods was the first of three, undertaken over successive summers. 1917 saw Cecil and Maud venture into rapidly industrialising coalfields


Photo: Mike Yates collection


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