Cecil Sharp in America
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Scan day: 03 February 2014 UTC
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Description: Article about his tour collecting Appalachian folk music.
I first visited the Appalachian Mountains in the summer of 1979. The following year I wrote a short article about the singer/banjo-player Dan Tate, which was published in the . In the article I made one or two mildly critical comments about Cecil Sharp, the English folksong collector who had made a remarkable collection of songs in the mountains during the period 1916-1918. A number of people, including Douglas Kennedy who had known Sharp in the early 1920s, were offended by my remarks and, realising that my knowledge of Sharp was, at best, secondhand, I decided to seek out Sharp's original diaries and extant correspondence, so that I could let Sharp himself tell me what had happened during his Appalachian forays. Sharp had been accompanied by Maud Karpeles, his secretary, and I found that her diaries were also available for study. Clearly, in order to gain a less one-sided view, it would have been better to also have had access to other contemporary records, i.e. from other people who knew Sharp or who had accompanied him during this period of his life. In a few instances I managed to trace people who remembered Sharp visiting their parents or other elderly relatives to collect songs. I also consulted contemporary newspaper accounts, such as there were, which documented Sharp's lecture tours outside the mountains.
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