Cecil Sharp

And it became a bit of a thing in the Victorian era and later in the '20s to start writing and collecting all of these down.

So we owe Cecil Sharp an enormous debt because we have all those songs now.

And so it has the music, and it has the songs, and it also has some of his notes about the-- where he collected it and, and what the songs are about.

So another brilliant music book.

And of course, it is very problematic.

But Cecil Sharp went one further and cleaned the whole thing up, publishing a baudelarised version.

It's a lovely idea, but completely misses the point, and we're left with a bland song.

No wonder his version didn't catch on.

Uh, who are some of those, uh, some of those songwriters that stand out to you from, uh, maintaining that history there?

Well, I mean, um, you know, there was, um, m- m- m- um, Cecil Sharp.

Mm.

Um, um, folklorist, he traveled, um, through...

Interestingly, an English folklorist who came to America and traveled through the mountain country with his assistant, Maud Karpeles, on muleback, collecting ballads and old songs, um, here.

A- a- almost in a flip from the earlier work by Sir Francis Child, where he had attempted to collect every ballad in, in, um, the British Isles and document them.

Cecil Sharp did something of the same thing in the mountains, in the Appalachian Mountains, basically, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

And, um, they were writing these tunes down, um, by ear or using wax cylinders sometimes to record them.

And so you get in the nineteenth century, you get these collectors going out, people like, uh, Sabine Baring-Gould, massively reactionary in lots of ways, but he recorded the folk songs of Devon and Cornwall with great respect for the people.

And, and then you got Cecil Sharp and W.A. Evans Wentz who were doing field work, and lots of people then doing field work amongst, uh- The, uh, traveling communities, uh, the peasant communities, and treating what they say as being worth listening to, and in fact, perhaps in some cases, a, a, a, a true representative of an older world that the learned with their books have forgotten.

So I think she represents that.

A- and I think James does that.

I mean, they were a vital part of community life in those little towns and villages and hamlets.

Cecil Sharp, et cetera, went and explored looking for songs.

That's why they went there.

So I think the child ballads are a foundation stone of Americana.

And that was really his world.

And then a folk singer named Bracey, F.A. Bracey, I think, discovered, in inverted commas, him at one of these events.

and took him to, or introduced him to Maude Carpiles, who we touched on last time when we were talking about the Appalachian tour of Cecil Sharp.

She was head of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, so impressed by what she heard about Phil Taylor that she brought him to London with his dog.