Dick

I think you miss the point - it's irrelevant that the schools version differs from the broadside version; most collected songs differ from broadside versions of the same song, that's part of the folk process.

It is relevant that the version published for schools wasn't what he collected, but those were the times. He was no different from other collectors - Baring-Gould found the words he collected for the same song to be too gross. (I seem to recall that Kidson in TT will print a verse of a song and then dismiss the rest as doggerel and omit it). But while Sharp may not have published the original text in the schools edition, he did collect and keep the text as sung - you can go and read his notebooks at CSH (at least you could in former times, I don't know about current status) or look at the published collection by Karpeles.


Mick