English folksong collector, musician, and educator. Sharp was born November 22, 1859.
Though largely self-taught as a musician, he was formally employed in that capacity for
much of his life. In 1903, motivated by a series of chance encounters with traditional
music, Sharp embarked on an unparalleled career as a collector of English and Anglo
American folksong and dance. He was instrumental in reviving the English Folk-Song
Society and in founding the English Folk-Dance Society with which the Folk-Song
Society later merged. Apart from his scholarly work, he helped popularize traditional
music among the middle class through his arrangements of folksongs for home and
school. Between 1916 and 1918, he and his assistant, Maud Karpeles, spent forty-six
weeks in the Southern Appalachians, amassing a landmark collection of Anglo American
material. A tireless fieldworker despite his poor health, Sharp had by the time of his death
on June 23, 1924, personally noted nearly 5,000 tunes from traditional singers and
musicians on both sides of the Atlantic.
In his American fieldwork, Sharp’s focus on English “survivals” caused him to neglect
many equally important musical forms. He thus failed to record religious material,
derivations of popular compositions, or local or migratory American songs, even when
these were offered by his informants; except for noting a few fiddle tunes, he claimed to
have encountered virtually no instrumental music. Nevertheless, the authoritative edition
of Sharp’s American collection, published posthumously as English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1932), can only with considerable qualification be characterized
as overly narrow, containing as it does 968 tunes for 274 individual ballads and songs.
In 1930 Cecil Sharp House was established in London as the permanem home of the
English Folk Song and Dance Society. While there is no comparable monument to
Sharp’s contributions to American folklore, he indisputably remains one of the founders
of serious folksong scholarship in both Great Britain and the United States.
John Minton
References
Karpeles, Maud. 1967. CecilSharp: His Life and Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——, ed. 1974. Cecil Sharp’s Collection of English Folk Songs, 2 vols. London: Oxford University
Press.
Sharp, Cecil. 1907. English Folk Song: Some Condusions, ed. Maud Karpeles. 4th rev. ed. 1965.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth