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Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work of David Harker
Folklore, April, 2002 by C.J. Bearman
The test of tradition is, surely, what sort of material survives and enters into wide circulation? If Harker's assumptions are correct, and singers only remembered and repeated the most recent songs, these ought to be the most popular and widespread. At this point, we may refer back to Table 2 and look again at the relative popularity of songs. Which were the most popular and in widest circulation? Table 6 gives a list of the 43 songs collected six times and more. There is nineteenth-century material on this list--"The Bonny Bunch of Roses" is about the ambitions of Napoleon, and "All Jolly Fellows that Follow the Plough" is not above suspicion of recent broadside origin. There are songs here which concern war by land and sea, press gangs, and women in love with sailors. But they do not predominate, and it is necessary to go a fair way down the list to find them. The songs most popular with Somerset singers were archetypal "folk songs"--"The Seeds of Love," "The Outlandish Knight," "John Barleycorn," "The Wraggle-Taggle Gipsies." Most of these were in print and available as broadsides, but that is not the point here: they were "traditional" in the sense of having been in circulation time out of mind, and had not been made up by ballad-mongers between 1800 and 1850.
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Neither were these songs the preserve of a small group of singers. Some 155 people contributed versions of these 43 songs, nearly half the total of 311 singers. I have to say here that the number of these most popular songs, and of the people who sang them, are actually under-represented by Sharp's methods and by my own. I have defined a "song" as a tune with at least some words, but there were many occasions on which Sharp did not collect the words to the most popular songs. As we have seen, he collected "The Outlandish Knight" fourteen times. He collected only a tune another thirteen times. Again, he said that nearly every singer he encountered could give him part of "Lord Bateman," though very few could provide a full text (Folk Songs from Somerset, Series 3, 1906, 75). Neither do these lists and tables include the many songs of proven traditionality which were collected less than six times. Although Harker's methods may not have revealed it, and although the apostles of the "invented tradition" may not want to acknowledge it, the evidence is that there was widespread knowledge of a considerable body of traditional song in early twentieth-century Somerset.
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