excuse me for publishing bearmans letter.An Open Letter to:
The Chief Executive of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (2nd draft)

Dear Madam,

This is an open letter of protest - it will also be published on the Musical Traditions website - about the untruths and disinformation recently fed to the media by your employee Malcolm Taylor, with regard to the radio programme The Seeds of Love broadcast on 26 August and to the article It's time to try Morris Dancing published in the Sunday Telegraph on 10 August.

The major theme of the radio programme was that folk music represented a 'working class' cultural tradition which was appropriated by Cecil Sharp and transferred to another class or classes. The Times's summary of the programme (T2, 26 August, p.29) asked: 'Did he [Sharp] misappropriate a working class culture or reclaim a vanishing tradition? Malcolm Taylor finds out'.

Malcolm Taylor did no such thing, because he only examined one side of the question and ignored the only relevant research, which happens to be my own. In 2000 I published Who were the Folk? The Demography of Cecil Sharp's Somerset Folk Singers (Historical Journal Vol.43 No.3). In that essay I showed that about 30 per cent of Sharp's singers were not 'working class' according to dictionary definitions, and that social mobility operated among them as among any other group of people. Since then, I have extended my researches to cover the work of other folk song collectors and have shown that the main influence on the social composition of folk singers was collecting methods. For example, more than half Sabine Baring-Gould's sources in Devon and Cornwall were not 'working class'. I presented these conclusions in my paper Towards the Social History of Folk Music, given at the conference of the International Ballad Commission at the University of Texas, and to the recent English Folk Song - Cecil Sharp in Context conference.

This is not a matter of two equally valid points of view depending on the same research base. The fact is that I am the only person to have applied large-scale biographical and demographic methods to this question, while the persons allowed to present their views on the programme were relying on assumptions and suppositions which I challenged and discredited. These assumptions and suppositions were politically motivated. The allegation that folk music represents a specifically 'working class' cultural form allows Marxist scholarship to claim the subject for its own and to apply a set of ready-made concepts which derive from their political and cultural theory, such as the doctrines of 'expropriation', the 'invented tradition', and the theory of cultural 'hegemony'. The person most responsible for this interpretation, and for applying it to the work of Cecil Sharp, is David Harker. In Who were the Folk? I began a demolition of Harker's analysis which I completed in Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Reflections on the Work of David Harker, in Folklore Vol.113 No.1 (2002). The 'debate' for which Taylor was responsible did not merely ignore my research; it also repeated discredited material.

In both the radio programme and the Sunday Telegraph article, associations were made between Cecil Sharp and the Nazi party, and between the morris dance movement and fascism in more general terms. In the programme, the association was made by V A F Gammon. In the article, the idea appeared to have been fed to the Sunday Telegraph's reporter by Taylor himself. I will deal with Gammon's association presently. The Sunday Telegraph alleged that Sharp had 'leanings towards fascism' which depended partly on guilt by association (because Sharp was an enthusiast of Wagner) and partly on a false quotation. The article alleged that Sharp insisted 'that folk song was a pure. Aryan 'race-product''. Taylor should be forced either to show that Sharp used those words in conjunction with one another, as the article printed them, or to write to the Sunday Telegraph and publish a true quotation with a retraction and an apology. He should also be forced to state precisely what he means by the allegation that Sharp has 'leanings towards fascism' and justify them by direct reference to Sharp's life and work, or acknowledge that the allegation is utterly baseless and publish an apology and retraction.

The association of morris dancing with fascism rests on the allegation of the 'supposedly brownshirt sympathies of prominent figures in the morris-dance revival'. Once again, Taylor should be forced to provide adequate evidence, or to publish an apology and retraction. In this case it would be necessary to prove that 'prominent figures' in the revival - i.e., more than one - either had actually founded organisations or had a major role in their organisation, and had direct links or publicly expressed support for the Nazi party's private army. (This is what the allegation implies). Needless to say, no such proof can be provided: in fact, the assertion rests on allegations made by Georgina Boyes, first in her book The Imagined Village and then in her own contribution to her edited collection Step Change, that Rolf Gardiner was the indirect founder or motivating spirit behind the Morris Ring. Boyes has never been able to produce any evidence for this allegation and it has been refuted again and again, most notably by actual participants in the foundation of the Ring such as Walter Abson. They have shown, not only that Gardiner did not take any part, but that some of the organisers had entirely different political affiliations, such as the Marxist allegiance of Joseph Needham. Indeed, the Editor of the Folk Music Journal recently drew attention to the fact that Boyes had no evidence whatsoever for her allegation and had ignored the many refutations of her association of Gardiner with the Ring, and concluded that: 'it is rare to find a published work which so misrepresents the source material' (Folk Music Journal, Vol.8 No.2, p.369). This is one more instance in which Taylor not only ignored the most authoritative research, but repeated discredited material.

I am a social historian, and if there really was any evidence that Cecil Sharp had 'leanings towards fascism', or that the morris dance revival had drawn on 'supposedly brownshirt sympathies', I would be the first to want them brought to public attention and discussion. Likewise, Taylor, Gammon, and Boyes are entitled to their opinions and are free to express them, within the limits set by scholarly principles and the presumption of innocence. But 'Fascist' and 'Nazi' are common words of abuse, and to accuse a person or a movement of such sympathies is highly perjorative. The very strongest evidence, therefore, is required before such allegations should be made, and in this case the 'evidence' is non-existent or has been disproved in public debate - it is noteworthy, incidentally, that Gammon has never presented any evidence beyond his bare statement that Sharp had ideas in common with the Nazis, and that Boyes has never attempted to answer her critics about Gardiner's supposed influence on the Morris Ring: instead, she has simply repeated her baseless allegations. It follows, I think, that these allegations cannot be made through any intention to engage in serious debate about Cecil Sharp's work and the legacy he left us; rather, the intention of this smearing and mud-slinging seems to be the silencing of Sharp; to shut him up, to deny him a hearing by associating him with political ideas which are not tolerated in the modern world. Taylor, Gammon, and Boyes seem to have despaired of demolishing Sharp's reputation by discrediting his work, and instead attack him on irrelevant personal grounds

There is a further dimension to this question. If it is acceptable to attack a person through the political principles and ideas with which they are associated (even in the most indirect and loose way, as shown by the manner in which Taylor, Gammon, and Boyes have attacked Sharp and the morris dance movement), should not their own political affiliations and sympathies be public knowledge and open to such guilt by association? Gammon's motive for associating Sharp with the Nazi party appears to be the importance he attaches to ideas, and the propensity of ideas for causing human suffering. The first time he made this association was in 1988, in a book review. The relevant passage reads:

    I admire Sharp and his work, but in a different context such ideas formed a cornerstone of a regime that perpetrated untold human suffering, misery, torture, and genocide. Ideas are important. (Folk Music Journal Vol.5, No.4, p.497)

Those words were written the year before the Berlin Wall fell and the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed with it. Since then, the opening-up of various archives has exposed the full horror of the Leninist and Stalinist regimes, even (one hopes) to those who had denied their crimes before. We know now that where Hitler slew his millions, Lenin and Stalin slew their tens of millions. It is as ridiculous and unfair to blame the ideas of Karl Marx for this untold slaughter as it is to blame the ideas of 'German romanticism' for the Holocaust, but, if people like Gammon and Boyes choose to sling mud through far-fetched political associations, it is fair to point out that a lot of mud can be slung back at them.

Please note that I am not actually saying that Gammon and Boyes are Marxists, but the links between them and Marxist ideas are far, far stronger and more plain than those between Sharp and the Nazis, or those between the morris dance revival and fascism. As I have already pointed out, the starting point for their discredited interpretations is the work of David Harker, a self-declared Trotskyite (Fakesong [1985] pp.256-257). In the course of a whole article devoted to Harker's work in 1986, Gammon described it his treatment of Cecil Sharp and the early folksong movement as 'the beginning of serious scholarly work in this area' (History Workshop Journal No.21, p.147). In his own PhD thesis, he declared himself uncertain whether or not it was a Marxist work. It has be said that, in a letter to the Musical Traditions website earlier this year, Georgina Boyes denied that Harker was the starting-point for her own work, but in a reply (published on the same website) I showed how one of her attacks on Cecil Sharp was clearly derived from Harker and challenged her either to deny this, or produce the independent research on which it was based. And, in any case, it would be an exceptionally innocent and politically unaware reader who did not notice the ideological direction of The Imagined Village. If it is fair to associate Cecil Sharp and morris dancing with fascism and the Nazis through common ideas, and to point out how these ideas were responsible for untold suffering, genocide, etc, it is fair to point out that Gammon and Boyes share Marxist ideas which, at a similar remove, were also responsible for untold suffering, genocide, etc.

These are not solely academic questions. In the Sunday Telegraph article, the reporter alleged that 'an echo of potentially dark associations does survive in the name of Sharp's enduring legacy, the English ... Folk Dance and Song Society', and that the Society's mission statement ('to put English traditions into the hearts and minds of the people of Britain') 'doesn't sound good ... in Blairite Britain'. There is nothing intrinsically 'dark' or disgraceful about England or English traditions: it is only these trumped-up, unprovable, and discredited associations with political causes which make them so, made by people whose own political associations will not bear examination - as I have pointed out. It is foolish to assume that sensational stories about fascist associations do not have repercussions among those who might otherwise consider becoming EFDSS members, or among the great and good who may make important decisions about your funding. In these circumstances, it is utter folly and suicidal stupidity for the EFDSS to allow such politicised smearing and mud-slinging to be perpetrated and assisted by its own staff such as Taylor. Wise birds do not foul their own nests, but that is exactly what you have done by allowing Taylor to make such untrue, stupid, and irresponsible statements. He, and you have brought the folk music movement into disrepute for the sake of your own self-importance and notoriety.

If I was a member of the EFDSS, I would call on you to sack Taylor and submit your own resignation. Like very many others, I am not a member because I have no confidence in an organisation so badly led, and which offers so little value for money. I would restrict my protest to this letter if I had any confidence that you and your organisation would actually do something about it, such as restrict Taylor's access to the media, but I know from past experience that your organisation's reaction to protests about abuses perpetrated by its staff is to allow those responsible to lie their way out of trouble. I am therefore taking the only action open to me, and withdrawing my copyright work from the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library as a token of my anger and disgust.

Yours faithfully,

C J Bearman - 5.9.03
Cecil Sharp was a socialist and an ACTIVE MEMBER OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, so I find it odd that he is described as FASCIST by any body