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Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work of David Harker
Folklore, April, 2002 by C.J. Bearman
Acknowledgements
The inspiration for this article came from a visit to the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, University of Sheffield, and I would like to thank Professor J. D. A. Widdowson and Robin Wiltshire. My academic supervisor, Dr Douglas Reid, helped shape the article through many drafts and devised the tables, and I am indebted to Dr Gillian Bennett, Chris Heppa and Lewis Jones for their help in preparing it for publication. The research was done while I was in receipt of a postgraduate scholarship from the University of Hull.
Notes
[1] The standard biography is Strangways and Karpeles 1933, which went to a second edition in 1955. Later, Maud Karpeles rewrote the book and published it under her own name alone (Karpeles 1967).
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[2] Harker's first degree, taken in 1969, was in the English Tripos.
[3] This passage also appeared in Bearman 2000, 761-2. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to reuse it.
[4] Harker (1972, 224 note 11) says that his analysis has been conducted "up to 31 August 1907." But in Fakesong, p. 189, he claims to have studied Sharp's collecting "up to the end of 1907." The latter statement is not true.
[5] Most of Harker's other figures are not easily checkable, but there is at least one other mistake on p. 191 of Fakesong. Harker says that "Louie Hooper alone contributed one-seventeenth" (i.e. of Sharp's 1,099 songs). One-seventeenth of 1,099 is 65. By herself, Louisa Hooper gave Sharp 27 tunes, though she sang a further 33 in company with her sister Lucy White. Source: computer database, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML).
[6] For the texts, see "Folk Words" vols 3-4 (361-727). For Emma Overd's version, nos 373-4 (p. 64). For Anna Pond's, no. 407 (pp. 300-1). The volumes of "Folk Words" are transcriptions from Sharp's Field Note Books held in the VWML.
[7] Overd sang, "I'11 follow the draggletail gipsies" and Pond, "I'm going with the wriggle taggle gipsy O."
[8] At the end of his 1972 article, Harker confused the issue by running his condemnation of Sharp's work in Somerset into a denunciation of Sharp and Baring-Gould's English Folk-Songs for Schools (1906), which had little to do with the Somerset collecting, and he may have intended this passage to refer to the school versions. Nevertheless, the title of his article was "Cecil Sharp in Somerset" and it must be taken as referring equally to Folk Songs from Somerset.
[9] Harker 1972, 234, claims to have analysed the "first four parts" of Folk Songs from Somerset.
[10] Version from Bill Bailey, "Folk Words" 5-6 (729-1086), nos 1018-19, p. 974.
[11] In 1914, Sharp negotiated the deposit of his written-up manuscripts with Clare College, Cambridge (see correspondence with Mr Mollison, May-July 1914, Sharp Correspondence Box 1 Miscellaneous, VWML). This was long before Cecil Sharp House was thought of, and in the event, the VWML has Sharp's working notebooks (the Field Note Books) besides copies of the written-up MSS.
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