One point if we are sticking to Sharp is that his piece is mainly a piece about music: it has been said before, and the piece makes it clear, he is discussing music, and, since the 'peasants' he listened to sang unaccompanied, we are talking about melody, and in some parts, metre, and in some places how the words and the melody fit together when his informants sing songs (which I remember having to do exercises in at a relatively low level of music theory, so I have some idea about how Sharp would have viewed this).

A few half hours with Middleton has problematized my simplistic 'complaints' that people ignore or don't talk about the music of 'folk' but since it is Sharp's main focus, it would be good to try to address what he says. Some of it is I think accessible and would be to people here who sing (please excuse me not naming names, too many to mention) and who state themselves to be at sea if it gets technical musically.

I know this is something Harker doesn't really address (except to be suspicious of Sharp's belief that folk music was 'modal').

Does anybody know whether Sharp found much in the major scale/ionian mode by the way?

There is something niggling away at me Sharp and it is this, I think: how does he account for the dissemination of 'folk songs' across the country? Is this a problem for his view of the non-educated folk with no intellectual learning except for life's ups and downs? How did farming ever spread from wherever it arose if that is the only way people learned?