Bloody hell, Cecil! That was quick! From absolute beginner to published expert in four years!

Sharp's 'epiphany' in Marson's garden is a bit of a myth, possibly propagated by his disciples. By the time he heard John England sing 'The Seeds of Love' he'd already been a member of the Folk Song Society (and thus a recipient of its Journal) for two years, and had been using folk songs in his school teaching for longer than that. As for being the prime expert, he simply set himself up as such, as described in Lucy Broadwood's quote: "He puffed and boomed and shoved and ousted...[and] came to believe himself King of the whole movement". 'Some Conclusions' is, as Vic says, a rather premature piece of work - one wonders whether he'd have reached different conclusions after his Appalachian trips, although perhaps his views were so set by then that nothing would have changed his mind.

That piece Vic pasted from the Guardian is largely accurate although slanted unsympathetically. I don't know that Sharp ever used the phrase 'Merrie England' - it was Dave Harker that did, in mediating what Sharp actually did say, about "the tap-room, the poaching, heathenish, Bohemian element in our villages" (which sounds much more exciting than 'Merrie England' to me).

To an extent I can forgive the narrowness of his search criteria when collecting in the Appalachians - he was seeking British folk song and had set ideas of where it could be found. In fact, quite a lot of what he noted was clearly not of British origin, and it's to his credit that he recorded it anyway. However, he did use that nasty phrase about 'a lower race', he did bypass at least one black settlement, and he made one or two other derogatory remarks about African-Americans. Before setting out for the mountains he expressed incredulity at the notion that 'negroes' could actually have any folk music of their own, but he did nonetheless collect songs from white singers that he knew had African-American origins, and he seems to have got on very well with the former slave Aunt Maria Tombs when he met her.

Sharp's ideas about folk song were inextricable from his notion that it was a racial product - which is why he thought it could be used to advance a sense of English-ness. 'Racial' in that context was used to mean something very similar to 'national', and deployed to distinguish the English from the Germans, so it wasn't necessarily used in its modern ethnic sense. So was Sharp a racist? By our standards, yes. On the other hand, those kind of views (the superiority of the white man, etc) were mainstream in his time. I think it was Martin Carthy who said something like, "He was a man of his time, but how much better it would have been if he'd been a man ahead of his time".

Sharp's work, particularly in the Appalachians, was truly heroic. Such a pity I can't embrace him as a hero.