(b London, 22 Nov 1859; d London, 28 June 1924). English folk music collector and editor. He was educated at Uppingham and Clare College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and took the first part of the MusB examination. At the end of his life Cambridge made him an honorary MMus (1923). He began working in Australia, where among other activities he played the organ at Adelaide Cathedral and became a partner in a music school. In 1892 he returned to England and became music master at Ludgrove Preparatory School (for which he edited a collection of national songs) and then in 1896 principal of the Hampstead Conservatory, a post that he held until 1905.
Two events turned his attention to folk music: on Boxing Day 1899 he saw the Headington Morris side at Oxford dance Laudnum Bunches and four other traditional dances; and in the summer of 1903, while staying at Hambridge, Somerset, he heard a gardener sing The Seeds of Love as he mowed a lawn. He quickly realized the potential significance and value of traditional arts, dance as well as song, for musical, social and educational purposes and thereafter devoted his life with missionary fervour to their preservation and propagation. Although not the first English folksong collector (the Folk-Song Society had been founded in 1898), he soon became the most important.
His first publication was Folk Songs from Somerset, issued in five parts between 1904 and 1909. English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (1907) was the first serious comprehensive study of the subject and remained so for half a century. His first publication on the dance was The Morris Book (1907–13). From then on he continued to collect both songs and dances, enlarging both categories to include carols and shanties in the one and John Playford’s social dances in the other. By 1911 he was convinced of the need for a society to treat traditional dance as the Folk-Song Society, of which he was a member, treated folksong; he conceived the English Folk Dance Society though as a more active body that practised as well as collected and studied the surviving traditional dances. In 1914 he was able to provide traditional songs and dances for Granville Barker’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in London and later in New York, which he visited during a lecture tour after the outbreak of war.
Sharp’s visit to America had far-reaching consequences. It led him to make a large collection of songs of English origin and local ‘square dances’ in Appalachia. This in turn gave impetus to American efforts, subsequently taken up by American universities, to collect and publish their traditional ballads and songs, both English and indigenous, and to conserve their other traditional arts. Maud Karpeles accompanied him as amanuensis and assistant on his three later wartime visits to the USA, and after his death she edited and published two volumes of his English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians in a library edition; Sharp himself published several books of these and other Appalachian songs between 1917 and 1923. After the war he devoted himself to re-establishing the work he had started: he founded vacation schools, gave lectures and demonstrations and revised earlier publications. He also did research on the history of the dance in collaboration with his friend Paul Oppé, who provided the illustrations for Sharp’s posthumously published book on the subject. His aim of ‘restoring their songs and dances to the English people’ was further advanced by his appointment by the Board of Education as occasional inspector of training colleges. Sharp made a unique contribution to the movement to preserve and disseminate the heritage of English folksongs and dances: he collected 4977 tunes, of which he published 1118 and provided accompaniments for 501. This was not only an outstandingly valuable achievement in itself; he also gave an impetus to the renaissance of English art music through the use that composers such as Vaughan Williams, Holst and Butterworth made of material that he had collected and made known to them.
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Folk Songs from Somerset (London, 1904–9) |
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with S. Baring-Gould: English Folk Songs for Schools (London, 1905) |
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with S. Baring-Gould and others: Songs of the West (London, 1905) [rev. of S. Baring-Gould and H. Fleetwood Sheppard, eds.: Songs and Ballads of the West (London, 1889–92)] |
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Folksongs without accompaniment, JFSS, ii/6 (1905); v/18 (1914); v/20 (1916); viii/31 (1927) |
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with H.C. MacIlwaine: The Morris Book (London, 1907–13, 2/1911–24) [dance notations] |
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with H.C. MacIlwaine and G. Butterworth: Morris Dance Tunes (London, 1907–24) [arr. pf] |
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with G. Butterworth and M. Karpeles: The Country Dance Book (London, 1909–22/R) [dance notations] |
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Country Dance Tunes (London, 1909–22) [arr. pf] |
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with A. Gomme: Children’s Singing-Games (London, 1909–12/R) |
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English Folk-Carols (London, 1911) |
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The Sword Dances of Northern England (London, 1911–13/R, 2/1950–51 ed. M. Karpeles) [dance notations] |
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The Sword Dances of Northern England: Song and Dance Airs (London, 1911–13) [arr. pf] |
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English Folk-Chanteys (London, 1914) |
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with O.D. Campbell: English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians (London, 1917) [without accompaniment; 2/1952/R, ed. M. Karpeles] |
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Folk-Songs of English Origin collected in the Appalachian Mountains (London, 1919–21) |
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English Folk-Songs (London, 1920) [2/1959] |
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Nursery Songs from the Appalachian Mountains (London, 1921–3) |
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ed. M. Karpeles: Cecil Sharp’s Collection of English Folk Songs (London, 1974) |
English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (London, 1907, rev. 4/1965 by M. Karpeles)
Folk-Singing in Schools (London, 1912)
Folk-Dancing in Elementary and Secondary Schools (London, 1912)
‘The Folk-Song Fallacy: a Reply’, English Review, xi (1912), 542
‘Some Notes on the Morris Dance’, The English Folk-Dance Society’s Journal, i/1 (1914), 16
‘English Folk Dance: the Country Dance’, MT, lvi (1915), 658–61
with A.P. Oppé: The Dance: an Historical Survey of Dancing in Europe (London and New York, 1924/R)
W.S. Shaw: ‘Cecil Sharp and Folk Dancing’, ML, ii (1921), 4–9
A.H. Fox Strangways and M. Karpeles: Cecil Sharp (London, 1933/R, 2/1955) [contains lists of edns and writings]
J. Reeves, ed.: The Idiom of the People: English Traditional Verse … from the Manuscripts of C.J. Sharp (London, 1958)
M. Karpeles: Cecil Sharp: his Life and Work (London, 1967) [rev. version of book by Fox Strangways and Karpeles above]
A.L. Lloyd: Folk Song in England (London, 1967)
F. Howes: Folk Music of Britain – and Beyond (London, 1969/R)
G. Shimer: ‘English Country Dances: Cecil Sharp (1859–1924) and John Playford (1623–c1687)’, Country Dance and Song, xiii (1983), 24–30
G. Cox: ‘The Legacy of Folk Song: the Influence of Cecil Sharp on Music Education’, British Journal of Education, vii (1990), 89–97
J. Porter: ‘Muddying the Crystal Spring: from Idealism and Realism to Marxism in the Study of English and American Folk Song’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, ed. B. Nettl and P.V. Bolhman (Chicago, 1991), 113–30
G. Boyes: The Imagined Village: Cultural Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993)
FRANK HOWES