Subject: RE: Songcatcher movie
From:
Barry Finn
Date: 15 Dec 02 - 01:23 PM
Here's just a bit on Dame Olive Campbell & don't discount her just because Cecil Sharp casts a long shadow. She stood on her own & never in the shadow of Cecil Or her husband John.
In 1916, Cecil Sharp was collecting ballads and Jack Tales in and around Madison County, NC. Sharp was an English musician and collector. The following is from Betty Smith' book.
In 1916 Cecil Sharp, an English musician and collector, came to Maidson County. He was interested in songs and ballads of British origin. The "Laurel Country" along the North Carolina – Tennessee border proved to be fertile ground. Sharp visited singers in five Appalachian states, but here he found the most primitive conditions and the most songs. Sharp brought with him an assistant, Maud Karpels, and for the first time both texts and tunes were written down. From Jane Gentry he collected seventy songs and ballads, more than from any other singer he encountered in the Southern Appalachians. Forty of these are included in Sharp's English Folk Song s from the Southern Appalachians, a collection unparalleled in America. We know about Jane Gentry and her songs because of an incredible set of circumstances linking John and Olive Campbell, the Russell Sage Foundation, Frances Goodrich, the Presbyterians, Dorland Institute, and Cecil Sharp.
Sharp came to the southern mountains at the request of Olive Dame Campbell, wife of John C. Campbell, director of the Southern Highland Division of the Russell Sage Foundation. Beginning in 1907, John Campbell traveled through out the southern mountains for more than ten years doing a social survey, and his wife often traveled with him. It was in December 1907, on one of their first field trips, that they visited Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky. Olive Campbell, a New Englander, had sung, "Barbara Allen" as a child, but during his visit she heard it sung by Ada Smith, one of the students.
'Twas in the merry month of May,
The green buds were swelling,
Poor William Green on his death bed lay
For the love of Barb'ra Ellen.
Campbell (John or Olive?) was overwhelmed by this experience and wrote:
Shall I ever forget it! The blazing fire, the young girl on her low stool before it, the soft strange strumming of the banjo – different from anything I had heard before – and then the song! I had been used to singing "Barbara Allen" as a child, but how far from that gentle tune was this – so strange, so remote, so thrilling. I was lost almost from the first note, and the pleasant room faded from sight; the singer only a voice. I saw again the long road over which we had come, the dark hills, the rocky streams bordered by tall hemlocks and hollies, the lonely cabins distinguishable at night only by the firelight flaring from their chimneys. The these, too, faded, and I seemed to be borne along into a still more dim and distant past, of which I myself was a part.
Barry
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