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Before discussing the specifics of the conflict between the Nealite and Sharpian camps, or examining the differing pedagogical stances they adopted as events unfolded, a brief

summary of the assumption underlying the debate about folk music and dance at the dawn of the 20th _{century will shed useful light on the foundations on which many of their arguments}

were based. More precise statements on the positions held by specific individuals will be detailed later in the chapter as appropriate; the list of concepts below serves as a more general overview of the debate at the time.

It was Ancient: Folk musics were held to be survivals of ‘primitive’ culture, passed down

through the ages and slowly degraded with the passage of time. The best and most valuable ballads, which exhibited the truest nature of the genre, would only be found by tracing back versions of songs as close as possible ‘to the point where they vanish in the mists of

unrecorded time’.54 This semi mythological, semi historical presumed point of origin can be traced back to Herder and the very inception of the term folk song: in essence, folk song had been considered historical from the moment it was considered as a concept at all.55

It was Over: Folk song was held to be ‘a closed account’. Since a folk song was inherently a

historical entity, it could not be created anew: all the folk music that could ever exist had already been created, and only the remnants and survivals could be uncovered. This view precludes the notion of second revival practices such as adapting existing material for current use, or creating new folk music in response to events of the present. For the collectors of the early 20th century, folk music was a finite resource.

54 _{Wilgus, 1959.}

It was Endangered: Not only was folk song a finished and finite commodity, it was also

dwindling rapidly. The ‘old fashioned’ way of life that had both given rise to these musics and ensured the continuity of tradition was considered all but gone: it was this that made present collecting activities imperative. That rural life had undergone repeated and rapid change since the agricultural and industrial revolutions could hardly be disputed; the arrival and spread of the railway in rural England the latter half of the 19th century, protests from farm labourers over working conditions and pay in the 1870s (the so-called ‘revolt of the field’) and an agricultural depression (resulting in very low crop prices) in the last two decades of the century had all taken their toll on traditional village life.56 The possibility that this increasingly mobile workforce of former agricultural labourers may have taken their songs with them into towns and cities, mills and factories was not explored until the post-war revival of the 1950s: the concept of such industrial folk song would have been seen as

inherently oxymoronic by earlier collectors. Each generation in turn considered itself slightly too late to collect this vanishing repertoire, from Herder in the mid 1700s, to Bruce & Stokoe in the 1850s, to Sharp et al in the early 1900s; the narrative of the desperate struggle for the last vanishing vestiges of tradition held considerable appeal, adding an air of cultural heroism to the collector’s efforts.

It was Rural: Folk song could be found in areas in which the endangered lifestyle that had

engendered it still held sway. Urban living after the industrial revolution was held to be the antithesis of the environment which nurtured, inspired and preserved folk song: only by going out and seeking isolated rural areas in which a pre-industrial lifestyle was still largely intact could authentic folksong be found. This view would persist well into the mid 20th century, when second revival collectors would begin to look for industrial folk song amongst the working classes in towns and cities. The ideal source for folk song would be elderly individuals living in isolated farming, herding or fishing communities. The wistful

romanticism of this view is clear with hindsight, not least in the numerous instances in which collectors describe such tradition bearers as members of ‘the peasantry’: a term which had been functionally anachronistic since the demise of feudalism.57 In England, such areas were

56 _{M. K. Ashby, The Changing English Village 1066 to 1914 (Kineton: Roundwood Press, 1974), 340-348.} 57 _{In a forthcoming edition of the Folk Music Journal, Vic Gammon and Arthur Knevett seek to clarify what was}

meant by the term peasant when used by collectors of this era to describe their informants. Whilst an exhaustive and detailed examination of the evolution of the meanings implied by the term throughout the C19th and early C20th, it features only information from the privileged side of the the power differential: they were unable to find evidence of a reflexive use of the word peasant by any who could realistically be described as one, nor any recorded reaction from anyone on the receiving end of this epithet, whether positive or negative. The article,

held to include Sussex, the Cotswold villages of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, and several collectors could well visit the same area on numerous occasions if it was thought to be a rich seam; the village of Bledington in Gloucestershire, for example, would be visited by

collectors of folk song, Morris dances, dance tunes and mummers plays in the opening decades of the 20th century.58

It was Communal: That folk song had a communal origin, in much the same way that the

words of its parent language had, was a common but not universally accepted view at the start of the 20th century. Communalist notions of folk song origin had been preceded by the same argument in literary circles concerning the origin of ballad text where folk poetry was held to be an evolutionarily separate strand from art poetry. The most extreme position of this

romantic notion followed the thinking of the German folklore collectors the Brothers Grimm, who held that the stories simply ‘wrote themselves’: an idea dismissed by more pragmatic antiquarian scholars such as F J Child.59 Despite its polarizing position, communalism was still central to the debate at the close of the 19th _{century, especially amongst American}

scholars: Francis Barton Gummere, William Wells Newell and Andrew Lang all wrote in support of communalism in the 1890s.60 The more generalist idea of communal growth and transmission of folk song was less controversial. The survival of song via community

selection, in passage through time, lent a pseudo-Darwinian sheen of evolutionary science to the discourse. Communalism as theory of folk song origin, after repeated challenge by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, was largely discredited by the mid 1930s.61

It was Natural: Because the creators of folk song had not had a formal education to teach

them otherwise, they were able to express only their true and natural selves in “simple and artless” style. It should be noted that these terms were used in a complimentary, rather than a critical sense: simplicity was considered a virtue; “art” and “artfulness” were equated with artifice in this setting. The ‘unlettered peasant’, from whom folksong could be collected, was defined against the ‘educated composer’ of art music: the scholar-collector’s skill with a pen was needed to preserve evidence of the oral tradition only because the tradition bearers could not. Being natural, folk song was also held up to be wholesome and healthy-giving, and a

entitled English Folk Song Collectors and the Idea of the Peasant, will appear in Folk Music Journal Volume 11 Number 1, 2016 .

58 _{Ashby, 1974, 393-400.} 59 _{Wilgus, 1959, 8.}

60 _{Wilgus, 1959, 4. It should be noted that Andrew Lang later reversed his position on communalism in 1901, as}

refining influence on the public’s comparatively vulgar taste in transient popular song of the Music Hall.62

It was National: Although Herder had not directly suggested the notion, by the turn of the

19th century the idea that folk musics were an expression of national, and more specifically, racial characteristics was widespread. Comparison between races and nations was central to nationalist discourse: Herder’s assertion that any one Volk could only be truly assessed under its own unique criteria, rendering comparison meaningless, was forgotten. Folk music had become an integral part of the wider justification of the colonialist reification of the nation- state.