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Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work of David Harker
Folklore, April, 2002 by C.J. Bearman
This evidence of oral tradition is scattered across Sharp's Field Note Books, his written-up books of "Folk Tunes," the typed collections Maud Karpeles made of "Folk Words," Sharp's lecture notes, press cuttings, and the published notes to Folk Songs from Somerset. Whichever source Harker used, he cannot have avoided seeing it. It is Harker, not Sharp, who deliberately ignored the significance of the singers' testimony when it conflicted with his own values and assumptions, and who suppressed the overwhelming body of evidence which did not favour his thesis.
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Closely associated with the broadside question is that of the age and traditional nature of the songs. Harker asserts that "to ask for old songs from old people in the early 1900s would necessarily result in the collection of items widely popular in a commercial context before 1850" (Harker 1985, 193). He claimed that Sharp's notebooks are "full of songs about Boney and the French, Turpin, war at sea or on land, press-gangs, prostitutes, and women in love with sailors," and implied that all these should be dated to the period of near-continuous war between 1793 and 1815 (Harker 1985, 193). The argument, then, is that most of the songs Sharp collected were of recent origin and had not been in circulation for longer than one or two generations. Consequently, they could not be regarded as "traditional."
Even if we assume for the moment that Harker's claim about Sharp's notebooks being "full" of these songs was correct, and ignore the odd chronology which lumps in Dick Turpin (hanged in 1739) with the events of 1793-1815, it is ludicrous to assume that all the songs with military or naval themes must date from that period. Firstly, war by land and sea had in fact been going on fairly continuously since 1688, and more or less continuously for centuries before that. Secondly, it is untrue to say that Sharp's notebooks are "full" of these songs: Harker's assessments and his numeracy are no sounder here than elsewhere. Even under such a catch-all category as "Boney and the French, Turpin, war at sea or on land, press-gangs, prostitutes, and women in love with sailors," it is still difficult to ascribe more than about 75-80 texts out of 590 to these themes. [19] That number includes songs which, theoretically at least, refer to earlier conflicts, such as "Admiral Benbow" and "The Duke of Marlborough," besides others such as "A Sailor's Life" (or "Sweet William"), which have only the most tenuous connection with any historical period. It would be just as reasonable to point to material such as "Little Sir Hugh" (theoretically, set in thirteenth-century Lincoln), or Robert Parish's "The Beggar," better known as "Back and Side Go Bare," which was first printed in the play Gammer Gurton's Needle in 1566. Even a song like "The Coasts of High Barbary," which at first sight looks eighteenth or nineteenth century, can be traced back to a snatch quoted in a seventeenth-century play (Folk Songs from Somerset, Series 4 1908, 19; Potter 1997, 235).
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