Sorry Morwen - just a reflection of the period, and the way country people were portrayed in the literature of the time - in my opinion Sharp didn't to a bad job of bridging the enormous class gap, and his writing always impressed me as showing a respect of and value for the people he was recording. Perhaps you know the story of his recording 'The Crabfish' from Mrs Overd?
"...and the way he portrayed them as being so eager to have their songs heard that they'll spend time preparing and waiting for someone to visit them and hear them sing. "
In the seventies we began to record an elderly Irish singer, Mikey Kellerher, in South East London - he was in fact known as a dancer in his native West Clare before he moved to London in the late 1940s, but it turned out he had picked up around over 60 traditional songs in his youth.
He was extremely shy of singing and would only record for us in the car, in a back-street in Deptford - he refused to let us record him at home.
After a couple of months of these sessions he took us to his home and introduced us to his wife who told us that he had never explained to her what we were doing but he would return home after these sessions and sit up in bed singing through the songs we had discussed but not recorded that evening so he would have them right for us the next time we met him.
She said, "I told him, ""You're going cracked, like your mother did"".
Norfolk singer Walter Pardon spent years piecing together his family's songs and writing them down in notebooks so they wouldn't be lost, decades before he had anybody to sing them to.
I don't think we ever met a singer in thirty-odd years collecting who didn't value their songs enough to want to get them right when they sang them for us - they valued them as being important and said so often enough.
Sweeney has expressed his contempt of and distrust for collectors often enough in the past as to leave us in no doubt of his opinions of them, yet, like every other singer of traditional songs, he has no hestiation in reaping the benefits from their efforts.
Jim Carroll