CJB asked:

"did the songs, music and dancs (icl. step dance) as collected &/or noted by Sharp and Karpeles in the Appalachians originate from the English, Scots &/or Irish immigrant commnities?"

A large proportion of the songs collected by Sharp and Karpeles originated in England or Scotland, although they also took down a lot of stuff that was obviously American in origin (including ballads, minstrel songs, hymns etc). They did take down a few fiddle tunes but that wasn't their focus - I haven't studied that side of it, but although there are certainly Scots, English and Irish influences in the fiddle music, there seem to have been European elements and a large input of American (including African-American) creativity as well. Sharp believed that a particular social dance that he called 'The Running Set' was a throwback to an ancient English form, but that idea has been strongly challenged recently in Jamisons 'Hoedowns, Reels and Frolics', which traces some elements of the dance back to Europe but also gives a lot of credit to black sources in its evolution.

"When I was there, albeit s few years' ago, the locals were quite adamant that the Irish had nothing to do with their folk traditions and that all of the songs and music originated from an imagined Elizabethan England, as did indeed their dialect. In fact I found their racisism against the Irish quite shockng."

Catholic migrants from the South of Ireland didn't make much headway into the mountain backcountry, which had already been settled from the 18th century onwards by people migrating from Ulster (themselves originating from Scotland and England), from Northern England and from the Scottish Lowlands. Hackett Fisher's 'Albion's Seed' traces the migration history in impressive detail. The Appalachian communities were labelled 'Scotch-Irish' or 'Scots-Irish' precisely to distinguish them from Irish Catholics - although the term is misleading since it ignores the large English component. At any rate, the Appalachian settlers were overwhelmingly Protestant dissenters (Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists) so, although anti-Irish racism is inexcusable anywhere (whereabouts were you, by the way?), there is some basis behind that denial of Irish cultural heritage.

The theories that Appalachia represented a living museum of Elizabethan England was put about by well-meaning educators and cultural meddlers in the mountains before Cecil Sharp ever got there. In one of the mountain schools they made the children perform Shakespeare plays on the grounds that they already spoke the Bard's English - much to the kids' bemusement! However, it does look as though a lot of the ballads, in particular, did originate in 17th / 18th century England so, while probably not Elizabethan, they are indeed old English.