I'm reading John Bird's biography of Percy Grainger at the moment. Grainger was a deeply odd person but his approach to folksong collecting seems a lot more in tune with modern attitudes than Sharp's. Grainger emphasised the use of the phonograph as a collecting tool and insisted that performances should be notated in detail all the way through, rather than being distilled into a representative melody and perhaps a few variations. He was also an internationalist who collected in Denmark and New Zealand as well as in England.

Grainger clearly admired Sharp for his zeal as a collector but thought his arrangements terrible. Interestingly, he offered Sharp half of the royalties for his arrangement of Country Gardens, which was based on a tune that Sharp had collected, and Sharp turned him down.