51 Facts About Cecil Sharp

Cecil James Sharp was an English collector of folk songs, folk dances and instrumental music, as well as a lecturer, teacher, composer and musician.

Cecil Sharp was a key figure in the folk-song revival in England during the Edwardian period.

Cecil Sharp collected over four thousand folk songs, both in South-West England and the Southern Appalachian region of the United States.

Cecil Sharp 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.

Cecil Sharp notated examples of English Morris dancing, and played an important role in the revival both of the Morris and English country dance.

Cecil Sharp was born in Camberwell, Surrey, the eldest son of James Cecil Sharp and his wife, Jane nee Bloyd, who was a music lover.

Cecil Sharp decided to emigrate to Australia on his father's suggestion.

Cecil Sharp arrived in Adelaide in November 1882 and early in 1883 obtained a position as a clerk in the Commercial Bank of South Australia.

Cecil Sharp read some law, and in April 1884 became associate to the Chief Justice, Sir Samuel James Way.

Cecil Sharp held this position until 1889 when he resigned and gave his whole time to music.

Cecil Sharp had become assistant organist at St Peter's Cathedral soon after he arrived, and had been conductor of the Government House Choral Society and the Cathedral Choral Society.

Cecil Sharp was very successful as a lecturer but around the middle of 1891 the partnership was dissolved.

Cecil Sharp had made many friends and an address with over 300 signatures asked him to continue his work at Adelaide, but he decided to return to England and arrived there in January 1892.

Cecil Sharp wrote the music for some nursery rhymes which were sung by the Cathedral Choral Society.

In 1892 Cecil Sharp returned to England and on 22 August 1893 at East Clevedon, Somerset, he married Constance Dorothea Birch, a music lover.

From 1896 Cecil Sharp was Principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music, a half-time post which provided a house.

Cecil Sharp 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.

Cecil 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.

Cecil Sharp became aware of English folk music in 1899, when he witnessed a performance by the Headington Quarry Morris dancers just outside Oxford.

Cecil Sharp 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.

Cecil Sharp 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.

Cecil 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.

Cecil Sharp 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.

Cecil 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.

Cecil 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.

Cecil Sharp collected a significant number of songs from Gypsies.

Cecil Sharp experimented with the new technology of the phonograph, but rejected it on account of a lack of portability and its potential to intimidate.

Cecil Sharp had assistance in taking down lyrics from Marson in Somerset, and Karpeles in the Appalachians, while making the musical notations himself.

Cecil Sharp was meticulous in noting singers' names, locations, and dates, enabling subsequent biographical research.

Cecil Sharp 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.

Cecil 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'.

Cecil Sharp argued that folk songs expressed Englishness, and it was vital that they should be taught in schools to inculcate a sense of national identity.

Cecil Sharp suggested that their melodies should form the basis of a new English movement in art music, in competition with the musical hegemony of Germany, a belief shared by Vaughan Williams and other composers.

In 1911 Cecil Sharp co-founded the English Folk Dance Society, which promoted the traditional dances through workshops held nationwide, and which later merged with the Folk-Song Society in 1932 to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Cecil Sharp's work coincided with a period of nationalism in classical music, the idea being to reinvigorate and give distinctiveness to English classical composition by grounding it in the characteristic melodic patterns and recognisable tone intervals and ornaments of its national folk music.

Cecil Sharp 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.

Cecil Sharp 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.

Cecil Sharp met Olive Dame Campbell, who brought with her a portfolio of British-origin ballads she had collected in the Southern Appalachian mountains.

Cecil Sharp was particularly interested in the tunes, which he found very beautiful and often set in 'gapped scales'.

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

Elizabeth DiSavino, in her 2020 biography of Katherine Jackson French, has claimed that Cecil 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.

Cecil Sharp joined the Fabian Society, a Socialist organisation, in 1900, and in later years became a supporter of the Labour Party.

Cecil Sharp was not a supporter of the Suffragette movement, although according to his colleague and biographer Maud Karpeles this probably reflected a disapproval of their methods rather than the principle.

Cecil Sharp was a nationalist, and believed that exposure to English folk song would engender a spirit of patriotism.

Cecil Sharp died of cancer of the upper respiratory system at Hampstead on 23 June 1924.

Cecil 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 enshrined his thinking in the 1954 definition of folk song drawn up by the International Folk Music Council.

An expert on printed broadsides, Harker argued against the oral tradition and maintained that most of what Cecil Sharp had termed "folk song" in fact originated from commercially produced print copies.

Cecil Sharp claimed that Sharp and Marson had bowdlerised or otherwise tampered with the songs, making "hundreds of alterations, additions and omissions" in their published material.

Cecil Sharp's song collecting in the USA has 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 Cecil Sharp had neglected to collect fiddle tunes, hymns, recent compositions, and songs of African-American origin.

However, Brian Peters' detailed analysis of Cecil Sharp's collection identified a large number of American-made songs, plus hymns, fiddle tunes, and songs which Cecil Sharp himself described as having "negro" origins.