Editing Cecil Sharp (section)

==Criticism==<!--The Imagined Village (book) redirects here-->

Sharp's ideas held sway for half a century after his death, thanks in part to an uncritical and rose-tinted biography co-authored by his disciple Maud Karpeles, who also enshrined his thinking in the 1954 definition of folk song drawn up by the International Folk Music Council.<ref name="Karpeles"/><ref name="Roud"/><ref>{{cite book |last=Pakenham |first=Simona |date=2011 |title=Singing and Dancing Wherever She Goes: A Life of Maud Karpeles |location=London |publisher=English Folk Dance & Song Society}}</ref> A. L. Lloyd, a Marxist and the chief theoretician of the second folk song revival during the 1960s, affected to repudiate Sharp's ideas but in fact followed much of his thinking.<ref name="Harker"/> He rejected Sharp's claim that folk song could be found only in isolated rural communities as "primitive romanticism", and described his piano arrangements as "false and unrepresentative", but praised his ability as a collector, admired his analysis of modal tunes, and used numerous examples from his manuscripts as illustrations.<ref>{{cite book |last=Lloyd |first=A. L. |date=1967 |title=Folk Song in England |location=London |publisher=Lawrence & Wishart}}</ref>

A more radical Marxist analysis was offered in the 1970s by David Harker, questioning the motivations and methods of folk revivalists, and accusing Sharp of having manipulated his research for ideological reasons.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Harker |first=Dave |date=1972 |title=Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Conclusions |journal=Folk Music Journal |volume= 2|issue=3 |pages=220–240}}</ref> According to Harker:
<blockquote>"'[F]olk song' as mediated by Cecil Sharp, [is] to be used as 'raw material' or 'instrument', being extracted from a tiny fraction of the rural proletariat and... 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."</blockquote>
Harker expanded this thesis in the influential ''Fakesong'' in 1985, dismissing the concept of folk song as "intellectual rubble which needs to be shifted so that building can begin again", and attacking scholars from [[Francis James Child]] to [[A. L. Lloyd]].<ref name="Harker"/> Folk song collecting, scholarship, and revival were viewed as forms of appropriation and exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the working class, and Sharp in particular was strongly criticised. An expert on printed [[Broadside (music)|broadsides]], Harker argued against the oral tradition and maintained that most of what Sharp had termed "folk song" in fact originated from commercially produced print copies. He also claimed that Sharp and Marson had bowdlerised or otherwise tampered with the songs, making "hundreds of alterations, additions and omissions" in their published material.

''Fakesong'' led to a widespread reappraisal of the work of Sharp and his colleagues. Michael Pickering concluded that: "Harker has provided a firm foundation for future work",<ref>{{cite journal |last=Pickering |first=Michael|date=1990 |title=Recent Folk Music Scholarship in England: A Critique |journal=Folk Music Journal |volume= 6|issue=1 |pages=37–64}}</ref> while Vic Gammon commented that ''Fakesong'' had taken on "the status of an orthodoxy in some quarters of the British left", and represented "the beginning of critical work" on the early folk music movement - although he stated later that, "this does not mean that Harker got it all right."<ref>{{cite journal |last=Gammon |first=Vic |date=1986 |title=Two for the Show. Dave Harker, Politics and Popular Song |journal=History Workshop Journal |volume= 21 |pages=147–156|doi=10.1093/hwj/21.1.147 }}</ref><ref name="Gammon"/>

A more critical analysis was offered by C. J. Bearman, who noted numerous statistical discrepancies in Harker's claims that Sharp and Marson's choices of songs for publication were unrepresentative: "It is an interesting variety of mistake which so consistently produces errors in favour of the argument being presented."<ref name="Bearman2"/> Bearman also disputed Harker's claims of mass bowdlerisation, on grounds firstly of factual misrepresentation and exaggeration, secondly for ignoring constraints on publishing erotic material in the Edwardian era, and thirdly for omitting the fact that Sharp had been open about his edits and preserved the original texts. In another paper, Bearman disputed statistics from Somerset communities that had been employed by Harker to challenge the notion of a rural peasantry.<ref name="Bearman1"/>

Harker's contention that much of the material collected by Sharp and others had its origins in commercial print is now widely accepted, however, and Sharp's narrow definition of what constituted "folk song" has been broadened considerably in more recent scholarship.<ref name="Roud"/>

In 1993 Georgina Boyes produced her book ''The Imagined Village – Culture, ideology and the English Folk Revival'',<ref name="Boyes"/> which critiqued the Victorian and Edwardian folk song revival for having invented a culturally anachronistic rural community – "The Folk" - and making unrepresentative collections of songs to support the idea. The book was also critical of Sharp's controlling tendencies, which some of his contemporaries complained about, and interpreted the power struggle with [[Mary Neal]] over control of the Morris dance movement in terms of a patriarchal refusal to share power with a woman. Roy Judge's accounts, however, apportion blame more even-handedly and stress their ideological disagreement.<ref name="Judge1"/><ref name="Judge2"/> There has also been criticism of Sharp's attitude towards the social dance activist Elizabeth Burchenal in the USA.<ref name="Walkowitz"/>

Sharp's song collecting in the USA has also been the subject of controversy amongst American scholars of cultural politics. Henry Shapiro held him responsible in part for the perception of Appalachian mountain culture as "Anglo-Saxon", while Benjamin Filene and Daniel Walkowitz claimed that Sharp had neglected to collect fiddle tunes, hymns, recent compositions, and songs of African-American origin.<ref>{{cite book |last=Shapiro |first=Henry |date=1978 |title= Appalachia on our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 |location=Chapel Hill |publisher= University of North Carolina Press |isbn= 978-0-8078-4158-7}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Filene |first=Benjamin |date=2000 |title= Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music |location= Chapel Hill |publisher= University of North Carolina Press |isbn= 978-0807848623}}</ref><ref name="Walkowitz"/> David Whisnant made similar claims about his selectivity, but praised him for being "serious, industrious and uniformly gracious to and respectful of local people".<ref name="Whisnant"/> More recently, [[Phil Jamison]] has stated that Sharp "was interested only in English music and dances. He ignored the rest".<ref name="Jamison"/> However, Brian Peters' detailed analysis of Sharp's collection identified a large number of American-made songs, plus hymns, fiddle tunes, and songs which Sharp himself described as having "negro" origins.<ref name="Peters"/>