Wilgus on Sharp (p56-64 of Anglo-American Scholarship … ) Part One

Section heading is ‘Cecil J Sharp and the English Darwinians’.

W sketches a history of modern English folksong study. He quotes from Parry’s inaugural address to the FSS. Parry hoped to ‘save something primitive and genuine from extinction’ and to recard ‘what loveable qualities there are in unsophisticated humanity’.

W then outlines how Sharp got involved, his early attempts to get funding for folksong collection, and his joining the FS Soc management committee.

Next, W describes Sharp’s ‘violent’ dislike of the 1906 Board of Education decision to recommend the use of ‘National or Folk Songs’, and explains that there was an argument in the public press, followed, in 1907, by Sharp’s ‘Some Conclusions’.

Sharps’ opponents, W says, defined traditional songs as those with ‘a long life in the public ear’. W says this would include songs that weren’t even folk transmitted, apart from the question of whether they originated with the folk. Sharp was unhappy with this.

W says that the strengths of Sharp’s piece are a) his analysis of melody and b) his study of the process of variation in tunes, but that neither was intended to be the last word on the question. Their main usefulness is in setting out a basis for future researchers. Regarding S’s analysis on musical aspects of ‘folk’ W says ‘These conclusions provide such a feeble reed that Sharp is reduced to writing, “We know a folk-tune when we hear it;- or we don’t’