Subject: RE: Sharp in Appalachia
From:
Brian Peters
Date: 08 Dec 20 - 06:16 AM
Here’s my take on Cecil Sharp in Appalachia (it’s quite long!). To give a bit of background, between 2011 and 2018 I undertook a major research project on the subject, directed originally towards the concert / audio-visual performance ‘Sharp’s Appalachian Harvest’, which I presented jointly with my American friend and colleague Jeff Davis. We toured for several years in the UK and US, culminating in a performance at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. At that point I decided that the topic merited a proper academic analysis, and went deeper into the research, going through all of Sharp’s diaries for the period 1915-1918 (the only years in which he kept them), available online at the VWML archive, his music manuscripts recording well over 2,000 songs from the trips (way more than were published), the boxes of paper correspondence regarding the Appalachian period stored at the VWML, and the archives of John C. and Olive Dame Campbell held at the University of North Carolina. I published the research as a 15,000-word article in the Folk Music Journal in 2018, which will answer many of the questions Steve and others have posed.
Having gone deeply into the subject, it irritates me a lot to read poorly-researched, biased and blatantly inaccurate writing concerning Sharp in the mountains. A shining exception is provided by the excellent articles by Mike Yates mentioned above, which provided a starting point for my own work. David Whisnant’s ‘All that is Native and Fine’ – a fascinating book essentially about the construction of the myth of White Appalachia – is very good too, fairer to Sharp than most though not always entirely accurate. The article ‘The Oak and the Acorn’ referenced by Sandman, is the opposite: based on the flimsiest research, agenda-driven, and flat wrong in several of its claims.
The first thing to realise is that most authors who have written on the subject have not looked in any depth at the actual material collected – many of them have little interest in folk song at all, and base their opinions on Sharp’s introduction to ‘English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians’, which was written after his first trip and is specific to a particularly remote area of North Carolina. It is regularly claimed that Sharp ignored everything that wasn’t an English / British ballad. This is nonsense. He and Karpeles noted many songs that were clearly of American origin – ‘Pretty Saro’, ‘Omie Wise’, ‘Wild Bill Jones’, ‘John Hardy’, ‘Old Joe Clark’ – you don’t even have to go into the manuscripts to find them, since they are right there in the book. Sharp disliked hymns, both as an atheist and because people sang them from books – but nonetheless collected quite a few – ‘O Sinner Man’ and ‘Pharoah’s Army’ amongst them – that he knew had African-American origins, even though they were sung to him by white singers. The collection includes a number of songs from the Civil War – not old enough to be proper Sharpian ‘folk songs’ but noted down nonetheless – homiletic and parlour songs (mostly unpublished) and a number of what Sharp called ‘jigs’, songs for dancing which were mostly of minstrel origin. There is, it’s true, a disproportionate focus on British songs, especially Child Ballads, which were the things that got Sharp really excited, especially those virtually extinct in Britain, but the accusation that he collected nothing else could only be made by someone who hadn’t bothered to look.
Steve is quite correct about his relationships with the singers. He was often highly complimentary about their musical abilities, he spent a lot of time in their homes simply chatting about matters in general (the opposite of claims that he was uninterested in anything but their songs), he presented gifts (as well as quite generous cash payments) including clothing, toys for children, singers’ photographs, books for a keen reader, an ear trumpet for a deaf woman, and, for a man interested in world geography, a subscription to the American Geographical Society. He developed close friendships and maintained correspondence with several of them. The idea that he would have preferred to go dancing with middle-class ladies is utter garbage. He wrote that the time spent roughing it in the mountains (and they really did rough it!) in the mountains was the happiest of his life.
Regarding black singers. Sharp was persuaded to mount the Appalachian expeditions by the ballad collection of Olive Dame Campbell, a middle-class woman living in North Carolina who had taken down many songs in the backcountry. On his first trip with Karpeles to NC, her hsuband John C. Campbell directed him to exactly the area where Olive had found the old British ballads, the Shelton Laurel, Madison Co., NC, which was at the time quite isolated and populated almost exclusively by white people of British (mostly English) extraction. This is the area where Dellie Norton, Dillard Chandler, Sheila Kay Adams and other prominent Appalachian ballad singers grew up after Sharp’s time, so not surprisingly it proved a goldmine for him. Many of the subsequent trips were also facilitated by Campbell, who always directed Sharp and Karpeles to areas known to have mainly ‘English’ or ‘Scots-Irish’ populations. When they began to plan collecting trips for themselves in the subsequent years, in Kentucky, Virginia and other areas of NC, they stuck to the same approach. They deliberately avoided areas known for predominantly German populations and, on at least one occasion, a black settlement. We might prefer they had done otherwise, but their primary focus was on British songs, not on the entire range of material to be found in the Southern states, and both time and money were limited. In all of this it’s important to remember that Sharp was an Englishman, the prime expert in English folk song, and had been tipped off that the mountains were resounding to ‘English’ folk songs, so that was his focus. However, as Mike says, he and Karpeles did take ballads from two black singers living in white communities, and Sharp spoke highly of the abilities of both.
Since the ‘n-word’ has been raised, it’s worth pointing out that Sharp’s default word to describe black people was ‘negro’. There are three uses of the offensive term in the diaries, and a few in the music manuscripts – in the sense of ‘N---- Song’ (which is likely how the white singer described it) and no evidence of him using it in public. The horribly distasteful remark in the diary quoted in Mike’s and my own articles concerning Winston Salem also sounds like something he’d picked up from someone local, and for balance it’s worth pointing out that he also described ‘negroes’ as ‘wonderful people’. He had never met a black person before visiting the South, had formed his impressions from the blackface minstrel shows he’d seen in England but, when he actually met black singers, he treated them with respect (I agree with Mike that he would have been excited to hear Leadbelly’s ‘Gallus Pole’). That is not to deny that Sharp shared the racial views pretty much universal amongst people in England at the time, i.e. a belief in the inferiority of dark-skinned races as a given. Guest ‘jag’ is also correct in concluding that, when Sharp writes about ‘race’, he is generally referring to what we would call either ‘nation’ or ‘culture’.
Politically, Sharp was on the left. He was a member of the Fabian Society, (still affiliated to Labour) and joined first the Liberal, then the Labour party. He wished to see capitalism dismantled, but by gradualist, democratic means, and did not sympathise with the Russian revolution (he preferred the Mensheviks).
As far as calling the songs ‘English’ went, Mike has already covered some of that ground. Sharp regarded the song traditions in England and Lowland Scotland as overlapping to a high degree, as some Scots scholars would agree. Although the migration to Appalachia is popularly framed in terms of the Ulster Scots, there was also an extremely large migration direct from England, and many other mountain people with a repository of ballads (such as the Sheltons and the Hicks’s) claimed ancestry from English settlers who had moved up from lowland Virginia. If you look at the actual material, a majority of the Child ballads most popular in Appalachia have their earliest known sources (as Steve will know well) in 17th or 18th century English broadsides: ‘The Housecarpenter’, ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender’, ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Little Musgrave’, and the same goes for the most popular non-Child songs: ‘Pretty Polly’ (Gosport Tragedy), ‘In Seaport Town’ (‘Bruton Town’), ‘The True Lover’s Farewell’, etc. So Sharp turned out to be right about many of the ballads having been English anyway, even though when he used the term he was well aware that there were many American-origin songs in the collection – I think keeping ‘English’ as part of his brand was important too.
I think I’ve covered a lot of the questions, but there may be more to come…
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sj
