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his death, to a ferocious 1980s debunking by iconoclastic writers of a leftward persuasion. Despite the efforts of a few academic disciples to defend their man, there’s still a bad odour clinging to him.


Sharp was a man of contradictions. In many ways he was a bit of a lefty himself: a Fabian socialist who expressed support for striking coal miners, an atheist, and a vegetarian. But he was also an ambi- tious self-promoter who could be bad-tempered and confrontation- al with colleagues, and who steamrollered his opponents, most notoriously his collaborator Mary Neal when she disagreed over the direction of the morris dance movement.


With singers, though, it was a very different story, however


lowly their rank. Many regarded him with great affection, and it’s clear from his diaries that the respect was mutual. Again and again, Sharp describes these poor and ill-educated people as intelligent, articulate, and good company. He would hand out generous sums of money, but it wasn’t just a financial transaction – he counted many of them as friends. He supplied finance to send the daughter of one impoverished family to school, and looked on indulgently when she ran away in the first week. He and Maud kept up corre- spondences with singers, and sent gifts of clothing, children’s toys, or their own photo graphic portraits, for Sharp was an accomplished photographer, taking powerfully evocative images of the singers and of mountain life.


Sharp also gets a kicking for allegedly pretending all the old bal- lads were English, especially from people eager to claim that Appalachian balladry and fiddle tunes belong to the questionable genre of ‘Celtic Music’. They point to the so-called Scots-Irish ethnici- ty of the migrants to the mountains – but again the truth is more complex. Historians tell us that more of the settlers came from Northern England than from either Scotland or Ulster, and Sharp was certainly aware both of the mixed ancestry of his singers, and the Scots flavour of some of the ballads. ‘English Folk Song’ was sim- ply Sharp’s brand, used in many of his book titles; at the time, the words ‘English’ and ‘British’ were often used interchangeably.


Odder, in fact, is that his book of ‘English’ folk songs includes an awful lot that Sharp knew very well were American-made. What- ever his original intention, and contrary to criticisms of his ‘blink- ered’ approach, he hoovered up versions of Pretty Saro, Wild Bill Jones, John Hardy, even Cripple Creek and Old Joe Clarke. He attended fiddle contests, transcribing several tunes, and even took the trouble to write down a few hymns and gospel pieces, which he loathed on principle.


The more serious allegation that Sharp ignored African-Ameri-


can music is quite true, though. A man on a hunt for old British bal- lads had no expectation of finding them amongst the black populace, although he did take down two songs from black singers, including a spectacular Barbara Allen tune from the former slave Aunt Maria Tombs. Sharp and Karpeles avoided black townships, just as they avoided centres of German and Dutch settlers, assuming there would be nothing there for them. There are, undeniably, a few statements in their writings that reflect starkly the thoroughly racist society they came from, which a modern reader will recoil from. Such attitudes, sadly, were common to many Edwardian English intellectuals.


Photo: courtesy Vaughan Williams Memorial Library


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