Sandman. You seem to be throwing out questions which have already been answered elsewhere. For example, Sharp and an American friend tried in vain to obtain funding for his collecting trips from various American foundations, but without success. So Mrs Storrow, an American philanthropist, gave him $1000 in 1916. Sharp kept meticulous accounts of this money and was able to tell her that by the end of that year's collecting he had spent $650, adding 'and have now 350 in hand, which I am leaving in the bank here as a nest-egg for my next campaign. I used it very freely chiefly in order to save time e.g. by hiring a motor when I could possibly have done without one, or by giving a generous gratuity to a singer to stimulate the memory. Maud, of course, as she always does, insisted in paying her-own expenses.' At one point Mrs Storrow offered to pay to have Sharp and his family move to America.
Then you talk about his lack of interest in the Appalachian singers. Not true. He gave copies of his photographic portraits to the singers and paid for the daughter of a singing family to go to school. His notebooks are full of comments about the singers, such as the following, 'The Mitchells are a wonderful clan, living in a small narrow creek about a mile from the hotel. They are considered a very low-down lot by the richer people here who wonder why we like them & go there so often.'
There is so much that has now been written about Cecil Sharp and his Appalachian collection that it seems odd that some people cannot take the time to actually read this, rather than continually trying to set out their own ideas of what might have happened, rather than what actually happened. I should have thought that during the various lock-downs people would have spent the time actually reading this available literature.