Malcolm is correct in saying that I haven't changed my opinion of Sharp's work as a result of the various revisionist views that have been put forward recently. But he's somewhat off the mark in his assessment of what my opinion is.

In 'English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions', Sharp says he saw the folksongs he collected as powerful tools for renewing English classical music and reforming public taste in music. Folksong was the 'musical heritage' of the English people as a whole and had once been known an sung by everyone. But by the time he began his fieldwork, he beleived that 'the practice of folksinging in England has, for very many years, been confined exclusively to one small class of the community.' The outcome of his work would, he wrote, see 'the English people enter once again into the full possession of their musical heritage.'

But songs and dances are more than just collections of notes and movements. Then as now, people can have justifiably strong feelings of ownership and views about how their particular performance should be done. So the process of transferring folksongs and dances from the 'small class of the community' who performed them to the nation as a whole wasn't necessarily welcomed. Although some people were pleased to see their songs in books or their dances treated as important, for others it was enormously problematic to find their longstanding traditions being taken away from them and given to strangers without their full consent. Some songs and dances were also changed in the process of being transferred - and records of performers comments exist to show how much some did - and didn't - like that too.

So to get back to Malcolm's point, my 'opinion' is that this process took place - and I present it as a matter of history. It's not a case of being 'for' or 'against', it happened.

Researching and trying to understand our history is important. Spending our time generating papers full of gusty indignation about what's past and can't be changed, I see as rather pointless.
It's a better use of time, it seems to me, to make the most of the benefits earlier collecting has brought us, while doing our level best to understand and avoid its mistakes.

Georgina Boyes