42 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, which is subject to widespread criticism.

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

Cecil Sharp's work has attracted criticism for its selectivity, bowdlerisation, and nationalism, as well as claims of racism, exploitation, appropriation, and classism.

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 was a barely literate agricultural labourer with six children.

Cecil Sharp enthused about her singing and transcribed many of her songs.

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 felt that speakers of English ought to become acquainted with the patrimony of melodic expression that had grown up in the various regions there.

Cecil Sharp began collecting folk songs in 1903 while visiting his friend from his days in Adelaide, Charles Marson, now curate in Hambridge, South Somerset.

Over 1,600 tunes or texts were collected from 350 singers, and Cecil Sharp used these songs in his lectures and press campaign to urge the rescue of English folk song.

Cecil Sharp became interested in traditional English dance when he saw a group of morris dancers with their concertina player William Kimber at the village of Headington Quarry, just outside Oxford, at Christmas 1899.

Cecil Sharp accompanied them on the piano and Wilkie spoke about the importance of 20 minutes exercise each day.

Between 1911 and 1913 Cecil Sharp published a three-volume work, The Sword Dances of Northern England, which described the obscure and near-extinct Rapper sword dance of Northumbria and Long Sword dance of Yorkshire.

At a time when state-sponsored mass public schooling was in its infancy, Cecil Sharp published song books intended for use by teachers and children in the then-being-formulated music curriculum.

However, Cecil Sharp did accurately note such lyrics in his field notebooks, which, given the prudery of the Victorian era could never have been openly published, thus preserving them for posterity.

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 was criticised by his own contemporaries, including Lucy Broadwood and Ralph Vaughan Williams, for his contradictory theories and his patronising attitude towards the rural peasantry, making it difficult to discern his true views, except that his work was deeply Nationalist in character.

Cecil Sharp was not a supporter of the Suffragette movement.

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.

Bearman later criticised Harker's analysis for ignoring the difficulty of publishing erotic material in the Edwardian era, and argued that Cecil Sharp had privately preserved the original texts.

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 a large 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.