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Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work of David Harker
Folklore, April, 2002 by C.J. Bearman
This article has concentrated on one aspect of Harker's attack on Sharp: the allegation that he misrepresented his findings. But even in this limited field, readers may be left with some feelings of bewilderment--the same sort of feelings which came over me when I first tested the accuracy of Harker's work. How can material with such glaring factual flaws be accepted and repeated in serious academic enquiry? Most of the points made in this survey--including the most striking ones--do not depend on extensive research, or, indeed, on any knowledge of folk music. They could have been made by anyone who bothered to apply common sense and a few elementary tests to Harker's arguments and statistics. Yet, so far as I know, this is the first time that anyone has stripped his work of its rhetoric and shown that this particular emperor has no clothes. This is a remarkable and lamentable failure of modern scholarship, and it exposes some surprising and unacceptable things about modern academic practice. Since a version of this article was given in public (at the "Folksong: Tradition and Revival" conference at Sheffield in July 1998), the comment most frequently made to me is that Harker's work was valuable to begin with but that he "went too far," as though inaccuracy was something which crept up on him between 1971 and 1985. That is not the case. All the points to which I have given attention were present in his original articles in 1971 and 1972, and indeed, there is much else which I have ignored in order to concentrate on Fakesong. What can only be called a particularly flagrant inaccuracy occurred in Harker's very first publication, in his "Introduction" to Rhymes of Northern Bards (Harker 1971, 1). He alleged that Sharp's theories (in English Folk Song: Some Conclusions) "rested complacently on his trips to a few people of particular ages and occupations, living in one small corner of Somerset." If Harker had actually read English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, he would have seen Sharp's statement that he had met "upwards of 350 singers and instrumentalists" (Sharp 1907, ix), and no one who studies Folk Songs from Somerset and the Sharp MSS (as Harker claimed to have done) can remain unimpressed by the geographical area covered by a middle-aged man, in poor general health, whose transport was his bicycle and the railways.
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Nevertheless, for the past thirty years these errors and mistakes have been repeated in publication after publication and have gone unchallenged by people who, supposedly, are in their positions because of their knowledge of source material and the acuity and independence of their critical judgment. Neither have they taken account of political extremism. To his credit, Harker has never concealed his political allegiances--he is or was a Trotskyite adherent of the Socialist Workers' Party (Harker 1985, 256-8)--but at the same time, it must be maintained that his is an extreme political position. To accept without question the opinion of a Trotskyite about Sharp and his work is rather like taking one's view of the Communist Manifesto from a member of the British National Party. But the caution and reservations which might appear natural in such circumstances were never observed or expressed by those who rushed to condemn Sharp in Harker's wake. Any attempt to restore Sharp's reputation has been derided as hagiography, and we have been told that we must concentrate on "the issues"--whatever they may be. Surely the issue here is that Sharp's work ought to be judged on the evidence and on sound methods of assessment, and not on the basis of a farrago of false statements, misconceptions, misunderstandings, suppression of the evidence, statistics that have no base, and numbers that do not add up, with its faults compounded by political prejudice and personal dislike. Harker's work is a blunt instrument intended to bludgeon Cecil Sharp to death. As a tool of critical enquiry, it is worse than useless. It is time to put this nonsense where it belongs, and to begin again with the patient examination of the evidence.
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