Cecil James Sharp (22 November 1859 – 23 June 1924) was an English collector of folk songs, folk dances and instrumental music, as well as a lecturer, teacher, composer and musician. He was a key figure in the folk-song revival in England during the Edwardian period. According to Roud's Folk Song in England, Sharp was the country's "single most important figure in the study of folk song and music".
Sharp collected over four thousand folk songs, both in South-West England and the Southern Appalachian region of the United States. He published an extensive series of songbooks based on his fieldwork, often with piano arrangements, and wrote an influential theoretical work, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions. He notated examples of English Morris dancing, and played an important role in the revival both of the Morris and English country dance. In 1911, he co-founded the English Folk Dance Society, which was later merged with the Folk-Song Society to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
Cecil Sharp's musical legacy extends into English orchestral music, and the classroom singing experienced by generations of schoolchildren. Many of the most popular musicians of the British Folk Revival from the 1960s to the present day have used songs collected by Sharp in their work. Scores of Morris dance teams throughout England, and also abroad, demonstrate the resilience of the revival he played a large part in sustaining. In the US, the Country Dance and Song Society was founded with Sharp's support, and dancers there continue to participate in styles he developed.
Over the last four decades, Sharp's work has attracted heated debate, with claims and counter-claims regarding selectivity, nationalism, appropriation, bowdlerisation and racism.
Sharp was born in Camberwell, Surrey, the eldest son of James Sharp, a slate merchant, and his wife, Jane née Bloyd. His parents, both music lovers, named him after St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, on whose feast he was born.
He was educated at Uppingham School and University College School, and Clare College, Cambridge, graduating in 1883.
In 1892 Sharp returned to England, and on 22 August 1893 at East Clevedon, Somerset, he married Constance Dorothea Birch, also a music lover. They had three daughters and a son. Also in 1893 he was taken on as a music teacher by Ludgrove School, a preparatory school then in north London. During his seventeen years in the post, he took on several other musical jobs. After his marriage in 1893, Sharp became a vegetarian for health reasons and took interest in spiritualism and theosophy.
From 1896 Sharp was Principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music, a half-time post which provided a house. In July 1905 he resigned from this post after a prolonged dispute about payment and his right to take on students for extra tuition. He had to leave the Principal's house, and apart from his position at Ludgrove his income was henceforth derived largely from lecturing and publishing on folk music.
Sharp was not the first to research folk songs in England, which had already been studied by late-19th century collectors like Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson and Sabine Baring-Gould. He became aware of English folk music in 1899, when he witnessed a performance by the Headington Quarry Morris dancers just outside Oxford. He approached their musician William Kimber, an expert player of the Anglo-concertina and a skilled dancer, and asked permission to notate some of the dances. Kimber went on to become Sharp's main source for the notation of Cotswold Morris Dancing, gave demonstrations at his lectures, and became a lifelong friend.
In August 1903, Sharp visited the home of his friend Charles Marson, a Christian Socialist he had met in Adelaide, and by then a vicar in Hambridge, Somerset. There he heard the gardener John England sing the traditional song The Seeds of Love. Although Sharp had already joined the Folk-Song Society in 1901, this was his first experience of folk song in the field, and it set him on a new career path. Between 1904 and 1914 he collected more than 1,600 songs in rural Somerset and over 700 songs from elsewhere in England. He published five volumes of Folk Songs from Somerset and numerous other books, including collections of sea shanties and folk carols, and became a passionate advocate for folk song, giving numerous lectures, and setting out his manifesto in English Folk Song: Some Conclusions in 1907.
In the years between 1907 and the First World War, Sharp became more focused on traditional dance. In 1905 he met Mary Neal, the organiser of the Espérance Girls' Club, a philanthropic organisation for working-class young women in London, who was seeking suitable dances for them to perform. This initiated a partnership which, though initially cordial and successful, soured over an ideological disagreement, Sharp's insistence on correct traditional practice coming up against Neal's preference for flamboyance and energy. This developed into a power struggle over control of the Morris dance movement, and finally into a public feud. Sharp pursued his interest in dance through a teaching post at the new School of Morris Dancing under the auspices of the South West Polytechnic in Chelsea, set up by the Principal, Dorette Wilkie, and stepped up his field collecting efforts, resulting in the publication of his notations over five volumes of The Morris Book (1907–1913). It has been argued that Sharp emphasised the Cotswold tradition of Morris dancing at the expense of other regional styles, although he did collect dances in Derbyshire.
Sharp also developed an interest in sword dancing, and between 1911 and 1913 published three volumes of The Sword Dances of Northern England, which described the obscure and near-extinct Rapper sword dances of Northumbria and the Long Sword dances of North Yorkshire. This led to the revival of both traditions in their home areas, and later elsewhere.
Sharp, assisted initially by Marson, worked by asking around in rural Somerset communities for people who might sing old songs and located many informants, the sisters Louisa Hooper and Lucy White of Langport amongst the most prolific. Sharp was able to relate well to people of a different social class, and established friendships with several singers; after his death, Louisa Hooper wrote of his generosity in terms of payments, gifts, and outings. He also collected a significant number of songs from Gypsies. In the Appalachians Sharp and Maud Karpeles similarly used local knowledge and their own initiative to find singers, and again made lasting friendships.
Sharp notated songs mostly by ear. He experimented with the new technology of the phonograph, but rejected it on account of a lack of portability and its potential to intimidate. He had assistance in taking down lyrics from Marson in Somerset, and Karpeles in the Appalachians, while making the musical notations himself. His transcriptions, which included melodic variations, were generally accurate, although some nuances were missed. Sharp was meticulous in noting singers' names, locations, and dates, enabling subsequent biographical research. He made many photographic portraits of singers at their homes or workplaces, providing a valuable record of life amongst rural working people in both South-West England and the Appalachian Mountains.
In 1902, at a time when state-sponsored mass public schooling was in its infancy, Sharp, then a music teacher, compiled a song book for use in schools. This contained a mixture of patriotic 'National Songs' (The British Grenadiers, Rule Britannia, etc.) and folk material. As his knowledge of folk song grew, he rejected the 'National Songs', which were absent from the 1906 collection English Folk Songs for Schools, co-written with Baring-Gould and using Sharp's piano arrangements. Sharp was determined that folk song should be at the heart of the curriculum, and fought the Board of Education in 1905 over their list of songs recommended for schools, which included many 'National Songs'. His colleagues Frank Kidson and Lucy Broadwood did not share his view, however, and the committee of the Folk-Song Society voted to approve the Board's list, causing a rift with Sharp.