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Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work of David Harker
Folklore, April, 2002 by C.J. Bearman
Publication Policy
If Sharp's actual publication policy is to be assessed, the popularity of different songs must be taken into account, as must be the number of texts which Sharp could consider for publication. In giving figures of my own, I have to explain that I analysed all five volumes of Folk Songs from Somerset, and so examined Sharp's collecting up to 6 January 1909 when the last material was collected. By then, Sharp had collected 2,046 tunes, perhaps 1,500 of these in Somerset. The number of texts, however, is approximately 590. Heavy emphasis must be laid on approximately, because it is doubtful whether any two people would agree on an exact figure. My methodology is explained in Appendix A.
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Of Sharp's 590 song texts, 345 were collected once, 95 twice, 52 three times, 40 four times, 15 five times, and 43 six times and more. Sharp published 130 songs in Folk Songs from Somerset, but since several songs were published twice with different tunes, there were only 123 actual titles. So he published some twenty-one per cent of what he collected. This is the average figure against which all others must be compared. Table 2 shows how many songs were published from each group.
It will be seen that the percentage published rises in accordance with the number of times each song was collected.
Table 3 gives an analysis by district on the territorial lines suggested by Harker. The first part of the table analyses the number of songs published from those unique to one district. It will be seen that Sharp actually published a higher proportion of songs unique to the North Mendip and Bridgwater areas than to Hambridge. "To avoid the reproach of having selected areas to fit my analysis, I have provided figures for a fourth area, the "rest of Somerset." The second part of the table demonstrates that the majority of songs published were collected in more than one of the areas specified. The methodology employed is explained in Appendix B.
These figures and tables show that Sharp did indeed skew his publication policy, but he did not skew it in the way Harker suggests. He gave preference to songs collected from more than one singer, in more than one place, and in more than one district, doing to a remarkable degree what the Introduction to Series Two of Folk Songs from Somerset promised in providing "the best and most representative" songs (1905, xi). This is all the more surprising when it is remembered that Folk Songs from Somerset was not a scholarly monograph but a published collection intended to be saleable and popular with the music-buying public. Its contents had to be accessible, singable and enjoyable, and it had to avoid too much duplication of what had appeared in other folk song collections.
Turning to Harker's discussion of bowdlerisation and the treatment of texts, there are three aspects which deserve critical consideration. The first test is the basic one of accuracy: checking that Harker's criticisms fit what was actually published in Folk Songs from Somerset. Harker fails even at this level. Take, for example, his comments on "Geordie," a song collected from Emma Overd and published in the first series of Folk Songs from Somerset (1904, 5). Here are Harker's comments on the changes, which, he says, Sharp and Marson made to the text:
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