Editing Cecil Sharp (section)

==In America==
[[File:CecilSharp HotSprings.jpg|thumb|A sign commemorating Cecil Sharp's visit to [[Hot Springs, North Carolina]]|281x281px]] During the years of the [[World War I|First World War]], Sharp found it difficult to support himself through his customary work in England, and decided to try to earn his living in the United States. He was invited to act as dance consultant for a 1915 New York production of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' and went on to give successful lectures and classes across the country on English folk song and especially folk dance. He met the wealthy philanthropist [[Helen Storrow]] in Boston, and with her and other colleagues was instrumental in setting up the [[Country Dance and Song Society]].<ref name="Walkowitz"/> He also met [[Olive Dame Campbell]], who brought with her a portfolio of British-origin ballads she had collected in the Southern Appalachian mountains.<ref name="Peters"/> The quality of her collection convinced Sharp to make several song collecting expeditions into the remote mountain backcountry with his collaborator [[Maud Karpeles]] during the years 1916–1918, following in the footsteps of Olive Campbell and other collectors such as Lorraine Wyman and Katherine Jackson French.<ref name="Whisnant"/><ref name="DiSavino">{{cite book |last=DiSavino |first=Elizabeth |date=2020 |title= Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky's Forgotten Ballad Collector |location=Chapel Hill |publisher= University Press of Kentucky |isbn=978-0813178523}}</ref>  Travelling through the [[Appalachian Mountains]] in [[Virginia]], [[North Carolina]], [[Kentucky]] and [[Tennessee]], often covering many miles on foot over rough terrain, Sharp and Karpeles recorded a treasure trove of folk songs, many of British origin, though in versions quite different from those Sharp had collected in rural England, and some altogether extinct in the old country. In remote log cabins Sharp would notate the tunes by ear, while Karpeles took down the words, and they collected songs from singers including [[Jane Hicks Gentry]], [[Mary Sands]] and young members of the [[Jean Ritchie|Ritchie family]] of Kentucky. Sharp was particularly interested in the tunes, which he found very beautiful and often set in 'gapped scales'.<ref>{{cite book |last=Sharp |first=Cecil |date=1932 |title=English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians |location=Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press}}</ref> 
[[File:Mary Sands c. 1920.jpg|left|thumb|213x213px|[[Mary Sands]] (1872–1949) of [[Madison County, North Carolina|Madison County]], [[North Carolina|NC]], c. 1920]]

Sharp wrote the following words a few weeks after his arrival in Appalachia:

<blockquote> The people are just English of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.  They speak English, look English, and their manners are old-fashioned English.  Heaps of words and expressions they use habitually in ordinary conversation are obsolete, and have been in England a long time.  I find them very easy to get on with, and have no difficulty in making them sing and show their enthusiasm for their songs.  I have taken down very nearly one hundred already, and many of these are quite unknown to me and aesthetically of the very highest value.  Indeed, it is the greatest discovery I have made since the original one I made in England sixteen years ago.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|title=Cecil Sharp in America|url=https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/sharp.htm|url-status=live|access-date=2021-09-29|website=www.mustrad.org.uk|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20000424142847/http://mustrad.org.uk:80/articles/sharp.htm |archive-date=24 April 2000 }}</ref></blockquote>

This strong focus on 'Englishness' is evident in Sharp's work, and he has been criticised for failing to recognise that many of the songs he collected were derived from the [[Scotland|Scottish]] rather than the English ballad tradition.<ref>Gower, Herschel, "How the Scottish Ballads Flourished in America", in ''Saltire Review'', Vol. 6, No. 20, Spring 1960, [[The Saltire Society]], [[Edinburgh]], pp. 7 - 11</ref>

Olive Dame Campbell and her husband [[John C. Campbell|John]] had led Sharp and Karpeles to areas with a high concentration of white people of English or Scots-Irish ancestry, so the collectors had little sense of the cultural mosaic of [[White Americans|White]], [[African Americans|Black]], [[Native Americans in the United States|Indigenous]] and [[multiracial Americans]] that existed across Appalachia, or of the interactions between these groups that had resulted in a dynamic, hybridised folk tradition. For instance, having witnessed in white communities a form of square dancing that he christened the "Kentucky Running Set", Sharp interpreted it inaccurately as the survival of a 17th-century English style, whereas in fact it contained significant African-American and European elements.<ref name="Jamison">{{cite book |last=Jamison |first= Phil |date=2015 |title=Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance |location= Urbana |publisher= University of Illinois Press |isbn=9780252080814}}</ref>

In their search for communities rich in British-origin songs, Sharp and Karpeles avoided German-American communities,<ref name="Peters"/> and on one occasion turned back from a village when they realised it was an African-American settlement. Using an offensive term then in common usage, Sharp wrote: "We tramped – mainly uphill. When we reached the cove we found it peopled by n----s ...  All our troubles and spent energy for nought."<ref name=":0" /> However, unlike other mountain collectors of the time he did take down ballads from two Black singers, one of whom he described in his field notes thus: "Aunt Maria [Tomes] is an old coloured woman who was a slave belonging to Mrs Coleman... she sang very beautifully in a wonderfully musical way and with clear and perfect intonation... rather a nice old lady".<ref name="Peters"/>

Sharp and Karpeles noted down a huge number of songs, many of which would otherwise have been lost, and contributed to the continuing tradition of balladry in the Appalachian Mountains. Their collection was described by ballad expert Bertrand Bronson as "without question the foremost contribution to the study of British-American folk-song", and by Archie Green as a "monumental contribution… an unending scroll in cultural understanding".<ref>{{cite book |last=Bronson |first=Bertrand |date=1969 |title=The Ballad as Song |location=Berkeley |publisher=University of California Press |pages=249}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Green |first=Archie |date=1979 |title=A Folklorist's Creed and Folksinger's Gift |journal=Appalachian Journal |volume= 7 |pages=39–40}}</ref> However, it can be argued that a fascination with [[Child Ballads]] and other old British material led him and the other fieldworkers of his era to misrepresent Appalachian folk music as an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon or Celtic tradition, and overlook its cultural diversity.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Rhiannon Giddens Keynote Address, IBMA Conference 2017|date=11 February 2018 |url=https://ibma.org/rhiannon-giddens-keynote-address-2017/}}</ref>

Elizabeth DiSavino, in her 2020 biography of Katherine Jackson French, has claimed that Sharp had neglected to give proper acknowledgement to female and Scottish-diaspora sources, although in fact he mentioned both in his Introduction to ''English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians''.<ref name="DiSavino"/><ref>{{cite journal |last=Peters |first=Brian |date=2021 |title=Book Review, Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky's Forgotten Ballad Collector |journal= Folk Music Journal |volume= 12|issue=1 |pages=137–138}}</ref>