Many folklore and folk music collections, such as those assembled by the Lomaxes and Sharp, can provide some degree of insight into a regionalised or specialised element of culture. These specialisations include Sharp’s collection of only English songs from the Southern Appalachian mountains, John Lomax’s work devoted to cowboy songs, and Alan Lomax’s collections based on early jazz and blues. The folk music can be especially useful in revealing regional differences in dialect, dissemination of songs, instrumental style, and
325 Miller, Karl Hagstrom. 2010. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Duke University Press, North Carolina. p. 281.
326
often song content. Karpeles describes this ‘scientific’ aspect of the collection, ‘From the scientific standpoint the value of the collection lies in the fact that it is an expression of the innate musical culture of a homogenous community’327 Although Karpeles is unequivocally complimentary about Sharp, and the reality of the ‘homogenous community’ that she describes is questionable, it shows that some collectors were interested in what folk songs could tell them about the culture they come from. Despite this anthropological leaning, some of these folk music collectors also had limited interest in the real culture they may have observed firsthand.
Sharp had a romanticised view of England’s folk song past in which songs made the countryside a more pleasant place,328 which he seemed determined to transfer over to rural America. Since he felt that England’s folk culture was in a state of irreversible decline, as a result of ignorance and neglect,329 he exhaustively promoted his view that it survived in America,
Although the people are so English they have their American quality [in]...that they are freer than the English peasant. They own their own land and have done so for three or four generations, so that there is none of the servility which unhappily is one of the characteristics of the English peasant. With that praise I should say that they are just exactly what the English peasant was one hundred or more years ago.330
The interest in the culture of these songs was limited to his agenda of demonstrating the Englishness of the rural Americans. His insistence on using the word peasant is part of the regressive associations he makes between American and English rural working classes. His idealised view of folk music in the past inevitably influences the way he represents the American ‘folk’ he encounters. This partly explains his persistent use of the word peasant, since he was determined to present these songs as representing an idealised past. The singing peasant was very much part of this idealised past, and he wished to maintain this romanticised state of arrested development in his informants. Sharp’s main interest was in
327
Karpeles, Maud. 1967. Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work. Routledge Ltd., London. p. 169. 328 Sharp, Cecil J. 1907. ‘Folk Song Collecting’. Musical Times. 48/767. p. 18.
329 Ibid. 330
retrieving these cultural products and trying to preserve them in some way. Although Sharp did not write a great deal of cultural theory based on his collecting, he nevertheless
discussed the people who had created the songs in his English Folk Songs collection. Sharp speculates on their origins in England and the Scottish borders, discusses their economic independence, the Calvinist leanings of their beliefs, and describes them as, ‘…a leisurely, cheery people in their quiet way, in whom the social instinct is very highly developed. They dispense hospitality with an openhanded generosity and are extremely interested in and friendly towards strangers, communicative and unsuspicious.’331 Although Sharp’s cultural investigations are clearly not the priority, it would be wrong to say he had no interest in the people from whom he transcribed songs. This partly comes from the Romantic context in which some of Sharp’s work is situated, which idealised the folk in a similar way and valued their natural civility and ingenuousness. This was also fundamentally a Fabian socialist belief in the benefits of traditional culture on the behaviour of communities, and by extension the belief that the adoption of traditional culture would have restorative properties in this regard.
However, his attitude towards the people he retrieved them from was ambivalent: he idealised their culture and general existence, yet patronised them and had a certain disdain for their fickleness. He did not believe that they were suitable as holders of these valuable traditions, and wanted to re – popularise them in schools, ‘He had no intention of allowing these treasures to remain hidden in his notebooks...and he threw all his energies and talents into reviving the tradition so that it might take its rightful place in our national culture.’332 In the case of Sharp’s English Folksongs the reader can only really learn about the culture of folk songs as he chose to depict it: an idealised rural existence based on an illusory past. Child’s output always depicted the ballad tradition as having arisen during an unspecified pre – medieval past in which there was no high/low cultural distinction.333 Child also had little interest in a contemporary culture which might still use these popular ballads, as Benjamin Filene points out, ‘If no new songs of merit had been created in the last four centuries or so, Child saw little point in making contact with current folk communities and
331
Sharp, Cecil J. 1917. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York, G.P. Putnam and Sons. p. v
332 Ibid. p. 109. 333
trying to dredge up songs from their collective memory.’334 Although, it could be argued that Sharp’s desire to educate folk traditions into the population came less from a disdain for the folk than a desire to improve the other people of the country. Also, whether this past was illusory or not is less important than its details, and where this idealised past comes from. Sharp’s vision of the history of folk songs, as argued in the previous chapter, comes from the Romantic tradition of folk music scholarship. Herder and the Grimms both
promoted an idea of the history of folk traditions which showed these traditions as part of a culturally homogenous community in which the songs and tales were what Herder called ‘communicative art’ that communicated in a familiar vernacular to the people of the
community. Although Sharp critiqued elements of the Romantic ideas of folk music, this was the intellectual context of his ideas and this is evident in his idea of folk music history. What this does clearly demonstrate is the collector acting as a cultural arbiter, not only in terms of Sharp legitimising the music he collected in the Southern Appalachians as remnants of an English tradition, but also what aspects of the culture he includes in his descriptions of the Appalachian folk. Sharp’s cultural arbitration results in an image of the Appalachian folk which emphasises their good manners, poverty but not squalor, and gregariousness. Sharp, however, seems well aware of his role as a cultural arbiter and notes this in his introduction to English Folk Songs,
…I am aware that the outsider does not always see the whole of the game, and I am fully conscious that there is another and less lovely side of the picture which in my appreciation I have ignored. I have deliberately done so because that side has, I believe, already been emphasised, perhaps with unnecessary insistence, by other observers.335
334
Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. University of North Carolina Press. p. 14.
335 Sharp, Cecil J. 1917. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York, G.P. Putnam and Sons. p. vii