Ó Springer 2006

GeoJournal (2006) 65: 55–66 DOI 10.1007/s10708-006-0007-z

Gathering the voices of the people? Cecil Sharp, cultural hybridity, and the folk music of Appalachia John R. Gold1,* & George Revill2 1

School of Social Sciences and Law, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Headington, Oxford, OX3 0BP UK; Department of Geography, Faculty of Social Science, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA UK; *Author for correspondence (E-mail: [email protected]) 2

Key words: Appalachia, ballads, collecting, folk music, hybridity

Abstract This paper examines the four trips that the English folk music collector Cecil Sharp made to Appalachia (1916– 1918) as a case-study through which to explore the relationships between nationhood and place identity. The first parts consider background on the theoretical underpinnings of folk music collection and about Sharp’s earlier work. We then investigate how Sharp and his companion Maud Karpeles initially came to collect what they felt were English folk songs, but gradually had to come to terms with Appalachia’s culturally heterogeneous folk traditions. This final part draws parallels with Be´la Barto´k’s approach to the Hungarian Gypsy tradition.

Appalachian music is America’s most primitive music, our equivalent of the African drum-beat. In fact, the influences on Appalachian music are the very make-up of America: African banjos and rhythms merged with European fiddles and ballads. Throughout the 19th century, songs carried from homes far away kept their singers linked to the lives of their ancestors in the Old World.1

World of Gramophones (2002)

Introduction Folk music has long been deeply implicated in debate about nationhood and identity. From the late 18th century onwards, scholars came to view folk music as a valuable medium for revealing the origins and essential character of the people occupying a territory. Scholars and collectors such as Johann Gottfried von Herder, Jacob Grimm and Be´la Barto´k in central Europe, Francis James Child and Phillips Barry in the United States, and Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams in Great Britain all constructed narratives that saw folk music as the true voice of the people (e.g., see Bluestein, 1972; Miller, 1986 ; Bohlman, 1988). Much of their work was premised on seeking out unsophisticated or ‘primitive’ peoples living in isolated rural corners of the

land, whose way of life was presumed to have been unaffected by forces of modernity. Somehow their supposedly ‘untainted’ culture reflected the intimate ties between people and the land to which they belonged, in the process indicating to an astute observer the true roots of national identity. These ideas certainly appealed to folk music collectors in the early 20th century. In the United States, for example, collectors set off for remote rural regions in pursuit of the identities that made up the American nation. Appalachia, which had long attracted the parallel attention of ethnologists and dialectologists (e.g., see Shapiro, 1978; Batteau, 1990; Haskell and Abramson, forthcoming), acted as a prominent focus for their endeavours. In the early 20th century, pioneer musicologists made trips to the remote valleys (‘hollers’) of the Appalachian Mountain regions of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and the borders of Georgia and Alabama (see Figure 1). They were looking for music that might reveal some cultural continuity between the current inhabitants of Appalachia and the English and Scots who had migrated there 150– 200 years earlier. They hoped to find a music practised by a society supposedly ‘allowed to flourish apart from the mainstream of American life (who had) actually preserved their Elizabethan culture as if they had been in a deep freeze or deep sleep like Rip Van Winkle’ (Forcucci, 1984, p. 69). One of the most prominent of these collectors was Cecil Sharp. Between 1916 and 1918 Sharp, a key

56 English collector of folk music, made four collecting trips to the Appalachians with his colleague Maud Karpeles. We consider the ways in which Sharp and Karpeles first came to collect what they felt were ostensibly English folk songs and how, over time, progressively had to come to terms with the culturally heterogeneous folk traditions of Appalachia and to explain them. We then place this in wider context by drawing some parallels between Sharp and the largely contemporary work of Be´la Barto´k, who faced similar problems of cultural heterogeneity when approaching the Hungarian Gypsy tradition. Before doing so, however, it is important to examine something of the complex and contradictory theoretical underpinnings of folk music collecting in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as considering some of the background to Sharp’s work before he began his work in Appalachia.

Folk theory and national identity The development of national musical styles since the 18th century has reflected changing conceptions of the nation state itself which, in turn, have had profound implications for the study of folk music (Bohlman, 1988). Liberal-universalist conceptions of the nation state, related to French revolutionary ideals and romantic aesthetic theory, were challenged during the 1830s by versions of the nation founded on an ethnically based particularism. To a great extent, all nationalist artistic styles – whether constructed around universalist legal-rational models, or ethnic particularisms, or a combination of both – needed to accommodate universalist and particularist aesthetics. To play an effective role in the task of nation-building, nationalist art needed to combine abstract and realist attributes, but also needed to have some populist appeal, reflecting the ‘real’ circumstances of a people’s history. At the same time it

had to ‘abstract’ these from current circumstances and project an idealized path from past to future. As an ingredient in the ideological strategies of nation building in the modern world, the collection of folklore and the study of folk music articulated the tension between universalism and particularism. This is evident in conceptions of the development and dissemination of folk culture, in systems for its classification, and in strategies of recording and collection. Theoretical constructs linking folk music and national identity date back to the publication of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s two volumes of folk songs Stimmen der Vo¨lker in Liedern (1778, 1779; later 1880). This is commonly regarded as providing the foundations for the collection of folk music in the service of nation building within European nation-states (e.g., Skultans, 1998; Francmanis, 2002). Philip Bohlman (1988, 2002), for example, argues that Herder provided two specific ideas that were enormously influential for the generations of folklorists and collectors that followed. The first was that folksong was as natural a form of communication as speech, and that the origins of speech and song were one. Moreover, the ‘commonality of speech and song... contributed significantly to the history of a people, intersecting to shape the development of literacy, religious practice, and responses to other cultures’ (Bohlman, 2002, p. 40). The second, and related, idea was that if folk music was a natural and unconscious expression, then the Volksgeist, or folk spirit, was explicable only as an expression of nature. From this viewpoint, when Herder specified ‘the characteristics of ‘‘the folk’’, he preferred to see them as ‘‘wild’’ and ‘‘lacking social organization’’ (unpolizirt), that is closer to nature so that they could be more responsive to ‘‘nature’s poesy’’’ (Bohlman, 1988, p. 6). By thus denying that folk music could have a composer, the idea arose that ‘a folk song composes and transmits itself’ (Danckert, 1966, p. 9; quoted in Bohlman, 1988, p. 7).

Figure 1. The Appalachian region.

57 The precise implications of these arguments depended on the message that scholars wished to extract from them. For some, Herder’s notions of folk culture offered a way to escape the Enlightenment’s stifling emphasis on reason, planning and universalism in cultural expression. Rediscovery of folk forms could help cleanse the artificiality that afflicted modern life, while the process of rediscovering folk cultures involved reimagining them. In the process, these ‘rediscoverers’ romanticized and transformed the cultures that they sought out (Filene, 2000, pp. 10–12). Other scholars proceeded on a different basis, arguing that Herder roughly equated ‘the folk’ with the term ‘ordinary people,’ thereby acting on an Enlightenment idea of universal humanity – a conception that transcended national or other boundaries. Here music as a universal attribute of the human condition provided a means of bringing together ‘enlightened human beings’ (Bohlman, 1988, p. 38). Yet whether supporting or countering Enlightenment ideals, further developments occurred when Herder’s successors linked the ‘folk’ to debate about linguistics, boundaries and nationalist aspirations. The Volk of folk song ceased to refer to ‘people’: Germans began to substitute the plural Vo¨lker, which possesses a more universal meaning and began to specify ‘nation.’ Whereas Herder did not apply the political-geographical designation ‘German’ to his 18th-century concept of folk song, his successors routinely did so, thereby conflating universalist and particularist national aspirations. As Robert Young (1995, p. 42) noted, there was an ambivalence in Herder’s work, which explains how he managed to appear both liberal and proto-fascist. Many who read Herder’s work emphasized the ideas of locality, nation, and homogeneity of race and culture. They also extracted anti-Enlightenment ideas of relativism, of difference and of the superiority of German culture (see also Bluestein, 1972, p. 11). The idea of ‘the folk’ as an expression of nature also played a significant role as late 19th century theorists applied the laws of natural science to folk music. Indeed, so profound was the influence of Darwinian science on folk music scholars that it was not unusual when Cecil Sharp stated baldly in his book English Folk Song (1907, p. 16) that: ... just as the pebble on the sea shore is rounded and polished by the action of the waves. The suggestions, unconsciously made by the individual singer, have at every stage of the evolution of the folk-song been tested and weighted by the community, and accepted or rejected by their verdict. The life history of the folksong has, therefore, been not only one of steady growth and development; there has also been a tendency always to approximate to a form, which shall be at once congenial to the taste of the community, and expressive of its feelings, aspirations, and ideals. It is clearly a case of evolution. Yet for all the universalist implications of Sharp’s Darwinian theory for the development of folk music,

there is clear evidence that he was thinking very much in terms of using this in the cause of an ethnicized, particularist nationalism. For example, later in English Folk Song, Sharp (1907, pp. 135–136) wrote: Our system of education is, at present, too cosmopolitan, it is calculated to produce citizens of the world rather than Englishmen. And it is Englishmen, English citizens that we want. How can this be remedied? By taking care I would suggest, that every child born of English parents is, in its earliest years, placed in possession of all those things which are distinctive products of its race. The introduction of folk song into our schools will not only affect the musical life of England; it will also tend to arouse that love of country and pride of race the absence of which we now deplore. To a large extent, the contradictory combination of a universalist theory of human development and the requirements of ethnic particularism were held together by the concept of ‘survivals in culture.’ Georgina Boyes (1993) traces this to Sir Edward Burnett Tylor’s book Primitive Culture (London, 1871) in which he argued that all cultures evolve in linear sequence through stages of savagery and barbarism to civilization, although the process did not occur in discrete steps. He suggested that residual expressive culture from early stages of the progression ‘survived’ into the civilized era in the form of traditional songs, games, narratives and customs. Therefore, traditional performances and beliefs found in contemporary or historical Britain could be equated with formally similar activities taking place in any other geographical area or temporal period. Armed with such ideas, for example, the folklorist Sir Laurence Gomme (1883, p. 4 ) could assert: In every society there are people who do not progress either in religion or in polity with the foremost of the nation. They are left stranded amidst the progress. They live in out-of-the-way villages, or in places where the general culture does not penetrate easily; they keep to old ways, practices, and ideas, following with religious awe all that their parents had held to be necessary in their lives. These people are living depositories of ancient history – a history that has not been written down, but which has come down by tradition. In their insistence that the folk were passive carriers of a traditional culture and that structurally similar elements of cultural practices could be found in radically different geographical locations, theories emphasising ‘survivals in culture’ are highly problematic. Yet through the work of such leading folklorists and anthropologists as Laurence Gomme and his wife Alice, Andrew Lang, R.R. Marrett and Charlotte Burne, this type of theory provided a universal justification for the pursuit of ethnic particularity among diverse and heterogeneous peoples both within the nation and across the world. The theory is justifiably criticized today as imperialist and exploitative. Boyes (1993, p. 14) explained its implications for the study of folksong:

58 ... by constructing the concept of a rural, uneducated, uncreative, Folk as the cultural source of their definition, the proponents of the survivals thesis obviated the need for close examination of the role and individual contribution of performers of all folk tradition. Their unequal status and ignorance of the ‘real’ significance of what they ‘unthinkingly’ inherited from their ancestors places the Folk outside the need for consultation or lengthy consideration. As mere temporary custodians of a common culture, they had no individual rights of ownership in what was clearly a heritage of the nation as a whole.

Cecil Sharp as folk music collector Cecil Sharp’s activities as a folk music collector need to be seen against this intellectual background. Sharp (1859–1924) was the foremost among a generation of English folk music collectors active around the turn of the 20th century that included the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, John and Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson, Mrs Milligan Fox, Mrs Kennedy Fraser and Mary Neal (Woods, 1979, p. 13). A full consideration of Sharp’s biography lies outside the scope of this essay.2 Sharp discovered his calling as an ethnomusicologist relatively late in life. Born in London in 1859 and having spent his early career in banking and the law in Australia, he returned to London in 1892 and earned his living by playing and teaching music (he had read both music and mathematics at Cambridge University). In 1896 he became Principal of Hampstead Conservatoire of Music, a commercial music college. By this time, he had become interested in country-dance, particularly Morris dancing, which he first saw performed at Headington Quarry (Oxford) in 1895. Although he would continue to document and publish material on Morris dancing throughout his life (e.g., Sharp, 1912; also Cawte, 1983), Sharp discovered his true mission in September 1903 when, at the age of 44, he heard his first folk song sung live by the gardener of a Somerset vicar. Somerset would subsequently feature large in his collecting activities. Although he collected in Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, London, Yorkshire and elsewhere, Somerset provided Sharp with 1,450 tunes out of his personal collection of 4,500 songs. He continually returned to Somerset and the borders of Devon as a collector, with his Folk Songs of Somerset being published in five volumes between 1904 and 1909 (Sharp and Marston, 1904–1909). This period of sustained collection also served as a major source for the general conclusions that he drew in English Folk Songs (Sharp, 1907). Sharp’s dogmatic viewpoint on the nature of folk culture, rooted in Darwinist cultural survival theory and on the social and geographical location of worthwhile collectable tradition has drawn considerable critical attention. For example, he argued that:

In bygone days, the ‘‘common people’’ formed no inconsiderable part of the population, and were fairly evenly distributed between urban and country districts. Nowadays, however, they form an exceedingly small class – if, indeed, they can be called a class at all – and are to be found only in those country districts, which, by reason of their remoteness, have escaped the infection of modern ideas. They are the remnants of the peasantry, which originally consisted of those of the ‘‘common people’’, who resided in the country and subsisted on the land. (Sharp, 1907, p. 4) Against that Dave Harker (1985), a trenchant critic, has suggested that Sharp’s claim that his respondents were ‘remnants of the peasantry’ is, at the very least, being economical with the truth. Harker, for example, says of Sharp’s chief sources: Louie Hooper was a shirt-maker, acting as an outworker for one of the town merchants: Mrs Overd was a town-labourer’s wife; William Nott (from Devon) and William King were both tenant farmers; Lucy White was the wife of an agricultural labourer; Tom Sprachlan was a retired soldier and a skilled dairyman; Lewis and Vickery had both retired from the sea; Robert Parrish was a sexton, and William Spearing a miller – not an agricultural labourer amongst them. As for ‘‘educated persons’’, added to the predecessors of the squires and vicars Sharp used, there was also an impressive array of, for example, nationally famous literary figures in the Somerset area, precisely at the period during which Sharp’s singers or their parents would have learned their songs. Bearman’s (2000, 2002) defence of Sharp against critics such as Harker supplies further evidence to support the view that his Somerset sources represent diverse social and occupational groups. Her detailed local study of Sharp’s respondents suggests that 39 of the 148 were indeed farm labourers (certainly not peasants). The rest came from a diversity of economic and educational backgrounds, and included six paupers (living in a workhouse), 11 farmers, two clergymen, several shopkeepers and some railway workers (Bearman, 2000, p. 758). Far from being a residual peasantry, his respondents were precisely the diverse population found in the industrialising and urbanising small towns and villages of an age of commercial agriculture subsequent to the opening of the railways. There are similar results in other aspects of Sharp’s collections. As Boyes (1993) suggests, if the information available on the life histories of the residents of market towns who sang to Sharp bears little relation to the unlettered and secluded archetype of his definition, then applying it to the miners and steelworkers from whom he collected sword dances in the Sheffield area in 1913 cannot be justified at all. The suggestion that folk songs were sung by ‘remnants of the peasantry,’ who followed the traditions of their forebears with unquestioning awe and in total isolation from contact with formal educa-

59 tion and any other aspect of contemporary life, was far from universally accepted even in the late 19th century. As early as 1893, for example, Joseph Jacobs described the Folk couched in the name of Darwinian survivals theory as ‘a fraud, a delusion, a myth’ and ‘simply a name for our ignorance’ (Boyes, 1993, p. 15; also Harker, 1985, p. 170). Moreover, even at the time, Sharp’s allies had some doubts. The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, himself an avid folk music collector, confided to his friends that he did not like the antithesis between town and country. Sharp came to modify his conceptions in the light of Vaughan Williams’ friendly criticism: Strictly speaking, however, the real antithesis is not between the music of the town and that of country, but between that which is the product of the spontaneous and intuitive exercise of untrained faculties which have been especially cultivated and developed for the purpose. (quoted in Harker, 1985, p. 56). Nevertheless, Sharp still wanted to present the singers who gave him songs as the last representatives of ‘a great tradition that stretches back into the mists of the past in one long, unbroken chain, of which the last link is now, alas, being forged.’ That perspective would remain when, in the second decade of the 20th century, Sharp turned his attention to the folk music of Appalachia.

Appalachian folk music The culture of the Appalachians fascinated many observers at the end of the 19th century.3 Principally settled by the Cherokee before the influx of Europeans, southern Appalachia saw an influx of English-speaking agricultural homesteaders from northern England, Lowland Scotland and Ulster between 1718 and 1775 (Fischer, 1989). Over time, the Appalachian backcountry was steadily invented in the American consciousness as a region renowned for rugged independence, individualism and traditionalism (e.g., Weller, 1965). Many attributed these characteristics to the relationship between the culture and the mountainous terrain. The heavily eroded and forested Appalachians, stretching from the Canadian border down to Georgia, once comprised a formidable barrier to westward expansion. For example, to the geographer Ellen Churchill Semple (1903), that barrier ‘condemned .... the Cumberland Plateau ... to isolation, poverty, and a retarded civilization’ (quoted in Heath, 1992, 304 ). Her sentiments were shared by many who believed that the area was a ‘haven for rubes and slackers, sorely needing modernization’ (Cohen, 2002, p. 10). Some felt the problem was so bad that salvation itself was at stake, with Presbyterian missionaries setting up settlement schools to bring civilization and progress to the ‘backward’ communities of the mountains. By contrast, others saw the barrier of remoteness as wholly beneficial. Appalachian topogra-

phy had helped to inhibit the spread of modernity, preventing indigenous communities from being contaminated by its pernicious influence. Yet, in keeping with the thrust of the ‘survivals in culture’ theory, isolation could not hold back modernity indefinitely. Migration, adjustment to industrial occupations, intermarriage with outsiders, and increasing literacy were eroding the basis of folk culture (Malone, 1979, p. 29). Time was short if scholars were to catch the remnants of what many considered to be America’s authentic folklore before it disappeared. Folk music was felt to be particularly at risk. Interest in the retention of rapidly disappearing folk music was an important factor behind the creation of the American Folklore Society in 1888 and the establishment of the first state folklore societies in the early 20th century – North Carolina and Kentucky in 1912; Virginia in 1913; and West Virginia in 1915 (Whisnant, 1983, p. 54). The prominence of Appalachian regions in this pattern is not coincidental. American popular culture at the end of the 19th century conceived of the ‘mountaineers,’ the inhabitants of the southern Appalachians, as contemporary ancestors (Shapiro, 1978; Batteau, 1990). That they should be singing songs that no one else remembered surprised nobody, given that this was an area with a resilient oral culture (Malone, 1979, p. 30). However, collectors travelling to the region were extremely selective about precisely what music they were looking for. Thanks primarily to the influence of Francis James Child, the Harvard Professor of English whose collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Child, 1882–1898) was published during the last two decades of the 19th century, they were primarily searching for ballads of Anglo-Scottish origins. By dint of impressive scholarship based on book and manuscript sources rather than the oral record, Child had compiled a collection of over one thousand ballads, which were assembled into 305 ballad ‘types,’ each with a catalogue name and number. In the process, he repositioned the narrative verse-based ballad as the key form of folk song surviving at the present day rather than simply archaic poetry read by academics (Zweig, 2003). Collectors who ventured into the field did so armed with Child’s classification system, and an academic outlook that cheerfully set aside other forms of music, such as gospel and parlour music, in favour of ballads. Moreover, Child encouraged collection of those ballads that had an impeccable British pedigree rather than other forms of balladry that collectors such as John Lomax (1910, 1915) had readily identified in North America. These included ballads sung by miners, lumbermen, soldiers, inland sailors (mainly on the Great Lakes), railway workers, black Americans, cowboys and down-andouts. Emphasising ballads with British roots rather than other expressions of balladry, of course, conveyed a selective representation of America’s so-called peasantry. By concentrating on the British connection, collectors linked their singers to a romanticized and, particularly Anglo-Saxon past. In addition, by setting

60 ballads apart from and above other types of folk music, collectors also effectively emphasized the historic mission of America’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ people.4 This was a new version of an old charade. In 17th century Virginia, the culturally nostalgic ruling elite had made their African slaves play the role of English serfs – dressing up like English farm workers, playing English folk games, speaking with an English country dialect and observing what were considered to be the ordinary rituals of English life (Fischer, 1989, pp. 388–389). Now folk music collectors travelled to the southern mountains to find the authentic English serfs, even if most were striving as much to document Child’s canon as to learn about Appalachian culture (Filene, 2000, p. 16). Following Child’s example, many of the early collectors recorded the words but not the tunes of folksongs, notably publishing commentaries on their works in the pages of the Journal of American Folklore, the quarterly periodical of the newly founded American Folklore Society (see the listing in Yates, 2002). During the early 20th century, however, greater attention was paid to the tunes and to the cultural context of the music, when collectors such as Olive Dame Campbell, Josephine McGill, Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway started transcribing the tunes as well as the words of ballads. In addition, several settlement schools recast themselves as ‘folk schools’ in which mountain people would be encouraged to preserve their own culture. Students would learn traditional ballads, folk songs and dances – although the teachers were biased in favour of the oldest and rarest British songs and generally hostile to the newer ones (Malone, 1979, p. 31). Sharp in the Appalachians The itineraries of Sharp’s visits to the Appalachians are conveyed by his correspondence and by biographies written by, or produced in collaboration with his assistant Maud Karpeles (Strangeways and Karpeles, 1933; Karpeles, 1967). There were four tours in all. The first was centred around Asheville, Tennessee, gradually foraging further out into adjacent states, and finishing up in the coal mining districts of West Virginia. From a total of 52 weeks spent in the field, he collected 1,612 tunes, including variants, from 281 singers, altogether representing about 500 different songs. Understandably focusing on the much sought after ballads, which were mostly but not exclusively unaccompanied, the first tranche was published under the joint authorship of Olive Dame Campbell and Sharp (1917) as English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. A two-volume set with the same title and edited by Maud Karpeles, containing 273 songs with 968 tunes, was published some years later (Sharp, 1932). Accounts of Sharp’s arrival in the area are particularly revealing. Sharp had first come to the US in 1914 to work as folk dance advisor to Granville Barker on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in New

York, and he subsequently lectured on folk dance in East Coast cities (see Whisnant, 1983, pp. 111–115). His first impressions were that there was little or no worthwhile American folk music but changed his mind when introduced to the work of Olive Campbell. Campbell had became familiar with Appalachian music while travelling with her husband John, a peripatetic employee of the Russell Sage Foundation who was working on social projects connected with education. Between 1907 and 1915, Olive Campbell had assembled over 200 ballads and songs (Yates, 2003). After talking to Campbell and taking note of contemporary academic debate within American folk music circles, Sharp became convinced that he might find the ‘lost’ folk music of his own country in the southern Appalachians. It was an irresistible opportunity to show the validity of the ‘survivals in culture’ approach that he had championed. Sharp delayed his first trip due to funding problems and the serious illness of his wife, Constance, but he was able to visit Campbell at her home in Asheville in July 1916 to look through her collection and work on possible collaboration. Thereafter he began the work of field collection in the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky. Early letters, put together in a booklet entitled Ballad Hunting in the Appalachians (text in Yates, 2003), convey his enthusiasm for the task. Travel was difficult, reinforcing the sense of undertaking pioneering research and supplying some reassurance that the communities would be suitably isolated and thus free from extraneous influences. On 13 August 1916, he wrote: I am still in the mountains. The journey on the day after I last wrote to you was indescribably terrible. I should not have believed wheels and horses could get over such tracks unless I had seen the thing done. I was frightened out of my life. Now Maud and I walk about everywhere, except occasionally we have to take a joltwagon (well named!). Frightened or otherwise, there was no disguising the elation he felt at the productiveness of his tour. Even after just 2 weeks, he could report that: I have taken down very nearly one hundred already, and many of these are quite unknown to me and aesthetically of the very highest value. Indeed, it is the greatest discovery I have made since the original one I made in England sixteen years ago. Part of his excitement lay in Sharp’s deep conviction that he was among his kin: The people are just English of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. They speak English, look English, and their manners are old-fashioned English. Heaps of words and expressions they use habitually in ordinary conversation are obsolete, and have been in England a long time. I find them very easy to get on with, and have no difficulty in making them sing and show their enthusiasm for their songs.

61 The ease with which Sharp could initially dismiss the overwhelming evidence of cultural difference in favour of a perceived thread of kinship is striking. Sharp was in search of and claimed to have found an Appalachia that was in, but not of, the American South. The assertiveness emerged strongly too when Karpeles (1967, p. 154), very much Boswell to Sharp’s Johnson, echoed her companion’s thinking on Appalachian music: There was not as in England the tiresome business of having first to listen to popular music-hall or drawing room songs of fifty years ago before extracting the genuine traditional music, because the people knew little else but folk music; and every one was acquainted with the songs although, as in any other community, not everyone was a singer.... There was no such thing as a concert, or even a community singing, but song was just part of everyday life... The whole time we were in the mountains we never heard a poor tune, except sometimes at the missionary settlements, or on the rare occasions when we stayed at a summer-resort hotel. The sense that Sharp and Karpeles interpreted Appalachia as arcadia and its folk musicians as unselfconsciously expressing the people’s close relationship to nature is palpable at many points. In the letter of 13 August 1916, Sharp alluded to the Hensley family with whom he had spent 3 days (Yates, 2003). His attention had focused on Emma, their 13-year-old daughter who, according to Karpeles (1967, p. 157), was a ‘singer of beautiful, Madonna-like appearance.’ Sharp learned that Emma was ‘crazy to go to school’ and paid the fees for her to attend, even though he was doubtful whether school was the best place for her or whether she would be able to resign herself to the loss of liberty. He was quietly overjoyed when she ran away after a day and returned home. ‘I am filled with admiration for her,’ Cecil Sharp wrote to his wife. ‘She is just unique; and it seems awful, nothing less than barbaric, to spoil her and turn her into an ordinary respectable half-educated American girl.’ The writings of Sharp and Karpeles, however, frequently struggle to maintain a consistent line when coming to terms with what, for all their assurances of feeling and being at home, was nevertheless a strange environment occupied by an unfamiliar society. Karpeles’ writings often reveal the exoticized tones of the travel writer. Sharp and Karpeles, for example, reveal a condescending colonial perspective as explorers when confronted what they regarded as primitive customs: It was not only in matters of cleanliness that the highlanders showed signs of having remained in the eighteenth century, but also in their patriarchal mode of life. In some homes the women did not eat at table until the men had finished; and one of our singers, a hoary-headed gentleman known as ‘‘Frizzly Bill", informed us that he had ‘‘owned’’ three wives (Karpeles, 1967, p. 149).

At the same time, there was a strong critique of modernity in his thinking. Karpeles noted: The people were mostly illiterate and had no money – serious shortcomings in the eyes of American city dwellers – but though they had none of the advantages of civilization they had a culture which was as much a tradition as the songs they sang. ‘‘A case of arrested development?’’ Cecil Sharp replied to the facile critic, ‘‘I should prefer to call it a case of arrested degeneration.’’ (Karpeles, 1967, p. 149) By implication, that arrested degeneration stood in contradistinction to the state of contemporary urban America, with its technological sophistication. At this point Sharp had clearly moved away from interpreting the music and people of Appalachia authenticated by ‘survivals in culture,’ to a more complex ideological mapping. Here a precious natural vitality, a universal quality of humans living in a state of nature, may reinvigorate very particular historical and cultural characteristics, and most particularly the moral fibre of specific nation states. Sharp commented in correspondence in August 1916 (Yates, 2003) that: Although the people are so English they have their American quality (in) that they are freer than the English peasant. They own their own land and have done so for three or four generations, so that there is none of the servility which unhappily is one of the characteristics of the English peasant. With that praise I should say that they are just exactly what the English peasant was one hundred or more years ago.

Managing hybridity The inconsistency revealed here was simply one of many apparent from Sharp and Karpeles’ writings. Despite the certainties that they expressed, Sharp had considerable difficulty in managing the contradictory elements of his thinking, particularly resolving the imperatives of his particularist search for the essence of English culture with his use of a theory based on universalist scientific and ‘natural’ principles. Indeed, the entire episode provides revealing insight into the ‘survivals in culture’ approach in action. Sharp employed universal scientific evolutionary principles to extract historical evidence for the reconstruction of an authentic folk culture for a people 200 years and 5,000 miles distant from the world that he regarded as their home country. In part, this reflects the frameworks imposed, since as Bohlman (1988, p. 45) comments: the efforts of Cecil Sharp, Olive Dame Campbell, and others to impose on many Appalachian communities folk music repertories replete with Child ballads and Morris dances is one of the most glaring examples of the disjunction between emic and etic concepts of classification.

62 Yet they were not alone in acting in this way. Sharp and Karpeles were influenced by contemporary debates within the US and by the genuine polarization of contemporary views about the mountain people. Just as some regarded them as ‘backward, unhealthy, un-churched, ignorant, violent, and morally degenerate social misfits who were a national liability,’ others believed that ‘they were pure, uncorrupted, 100 percent American, picturesque and photogenic pre-moderns who were a great untapped national treasure’ (Whisnant, 1983, p. 11). Moreover, it would be wrong to interpret the apparent contradictions in Sharp’s work as incompatible perspectives. When taken together, they can be interpreted as the defining characteristics of an Orientalist paradigm focused on the gendered binary opposition of a ‘morally superior us (or ‘‘collective Self’’) and an appealing but dangerous them (‘‘collective other’’)’ an eroticized encounter in which ‘they’ come close to causing ‘our’ downfall (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000, p. 8, emphases added). In this sense, the figure of Emma may easily be seen as an embodiment of Sharp’s eroticized colonial imagination. It is certainly true that no matter how much Sharp and Karpeles protested their honourable intentions or indeed disparaged the work of other collectors that they deemed consciously exploitative, their approach to collecting was at least unselfconsciously prejudiced. Songs are ‘captured’ or ‘harvested.’ While Sharp believed that he had the common touch, he was always uneasy with his respondents beyond bounds of polite restrained deference (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000, p. 8; see also Said, 1978). Nevertheless, Sharp’s writings show his increasing difficulty in managing the contradictory imperatives of his search, particularly in view of the evident heterogeneity of Appalachian music. The more Sharp travelled, the more he was forced to recognize the uncomfortable reality of cultural hybridity. Sharp admitted this grudgingly at first but by the time of his later visits, which included the Appalachian coalfields, the problem had become more persistent: This trip is causing me to modify the opinion that I first formed that the singing of folk-songs was universal in the mountains. It was undoubtedly true in North Carolina, but I have as yet found no district elsewhere of which this is true. Primitiveness in custom and outlook is not, I am finding, so much the result of remoteness as bad economic conditions (Whisnant, 1983, p. 121). As Whisnant suggests: ‘obviously no concept of ‘‘racial heritage’’ could explain what Sharp was meeting up with in Eastern Kentucky.’5 Sharp clearly felt most comfortable, most rewarded for his efforts, most confirmed in his theories and estimates of mountain culture and its origins while working from the settlement schools, such as those at Hindman (Kentucky) and Pine Mountain (Georgia). Yet Sharp and Karpeles had condemned these very locations for instilling a polite

semi-educated quiescence into a vital and independent people (as in the case of Emma Hensley cited earlier). The first volume of English Songs from the Southern Appalachians, published in 1917, with its overgeneralizations and idealization of the Arcadian existence of the Highland people, failed to acknowledge that almost half of more than 300 items compiled in his highly successful earlier trips had been gathered near Asheville, Tennessee and Charlottesville, Virginia. Asheville was a town of over 20,000 people with an electric power station and electric street cars; Charlottesville was the home of the University of Virginia. Though Sharp and Karpeles roundly condemned the effects of tourist resorts on cultural survivals, Hot Springs in Bath County (Virginia), one of Sharp’s major collecting points, had been a significant spa for 50 years. Furthermore nearby Madison County, another favoured area of Virginia, was dotted with the much maligned Presbyterian mission schools and Allanstand had been the seat of a social settlement and handcraft revival for more than 20 years (Whisnant, 1983, p. 119). The evidence of the collection itself made Sharp change his position and encouraged Karpeles, writing 15 years after the event, to couch the second chapter of the biography devoted to the Appalachian excursions as something of an apologia. Though it was possible to connect the words of songs to English and Scottish sources, the music itself was highly distinctive. Sharp used little, if any, of this music in his later edited collections of English music. Sharp and Karpeles had to resort to the moral supremacy of a more communal, ‘natural’ life in the Appalachians to justify their aesthetic judgement regarding the value of the music in spite of the fact that Sharp himself had already questioned this idea: Whether one prefers Appalachian or the English type is a matter of taste, and there is happily no need to make a choice, but taken in the aggregate most people would agree that the general average of the Appalachian songs is higher than that of the English collections. From the scientific standpoint the value of Cecil Sharp’s Appalachian collections lies in the fact that it is an expression of the innate musical culture of a homogeneous community. (Karpeles, 1967, p. 176)

Sharp and Barto´k To understand Sharp’s approach better, it is instructive to focus more on the ways in which the hybridity of the music and culture are mediated within an essentialist framework. In this regard, there are many parallels between the practices of Sharp as a collector and those of the Hungarian composer and collector of folk music Be´la Barto´k (1881–1945). Like Sharp, Barto´k was committed to a Darwinian view of the history of music and centred his collecting on the ‘survivals in culture’ principle. He began his folk collecting in 1904 and

63 continued this work into the 1930s – dates that overlapped somewhat with those of Sharp’s folk collecting career. Barto´k was concerned that the music of the Hungarian Gypsies held a false position as the authentic national music of Hungary. For him their music was inauthentic, first, because they were a migrant people and, secondly, because it was substantially derived from the bourgeois culture of a discredited ruling conservative elite. Like Sharp, Barto´k set out to discover a true national folk music in the music of the rural peasantry, which would form a vital and pure source from which to reinvigorate modern national life (Botstein, 1995, pp. 46–51; also Bohlman, 2002, pp. 66–68). As studies proceeded both within Hungary and in neighbouring countries and as national boundaries changed after World War I, Barto´k embraced a more pluralist conception of folk culture and one that started to incorporate Gypsy music. By the 1940s he was writing of Hungary as a ‘European melting pot,’ effectively arguing in support of anti-racism against the ideology of fascism. As early as 1931 Barto´k had written: My own idea, however – of which I have been fully conscious since I found myself as a composer – is the brotherhood of peoples, brotherhood in spite of all wars and conflicts. I try – to the best of my ability – to serve this idea in my music; therefore I don’t reject any influence, be it Slovakian, Romanian, Arabic or from any other source. The source must only be clean, fresh and healthy! (Deme´ny, 1971, p. 201). Julie Brown (2000), in an incisive analysis, argues that we can understand Barto´k’s approach to Gypsy music through an Orientalist perspective in which the Gypsies constitute an exotic, impure ‘other’ infecting and degrading music with elaboration and improvisation at the same time, seductive, dangerous and vital. In this sense, there are similarities with Sharp’s on-off engagement with England’s distant, exotic, and nativized ‘other’ in Appalachia. Yet Barto´k remained true to Herder’s conception of folk culture. This was both relativist – the folk as a universal category – and elitist – a particularist categorization leading to a hierarchy of cultures (Brown, 2000, p. 132). This strongly resembles the way that Sharp continued to link the ‘supreme cultural value of an inherited tradition’ to ‘racial attributes’ in a contradictory formulation in which creativity is viewed as a product of tradition. In his words this is: ‘acquired and accumulated in past centuries and handed down generation by generation, each generation adding its quota to that which it received’ (Karpeles, 1967, p. 176). Brown suggests that despite the increasingly inclusive rhetoric, Barto´k continued to superimpose a nationalistic ideal over the universally humanist one. Barto´k envisaged integrating foreign ethnic elements within a Hungarian-dominated style, since he was not advocating: a freewheeling pluralism, or internationalism, for his own music. Rather, Barto´k, argued that because

‘‘character and milieu must somehow harmonize with each other’’ his ‘‘style – notwithstanding its various sources – has a Hungarian character.’’ In other words, his model of Hungarian culture, even at this least chauvinistic state of his thinking on the subject, echoed Herder’s isolationist–diffusionist model of German culture (Deme´ny, 1971, p. 201; quoted in Brown, 2000, p. 133). It is tempting to draw parallels between Barto´k’s strategy in coming to terms with Hungary as a European melting pot with Sharp’s similar experience in the cultural melting pot of the United States.6 In 1942 Barto´k still held that, in the case of folk music, ‘more or less ancient styles are generally well preserved’ despite the enriching processes of intermixture and melodic migration (Suchoff, 1976, p. 30 ; Brown, 2000, p. 134). ‘But how,’ Brown (2000, p. 134) asks: ‘is it possible to support such a notion? How is it possible to deem intermixture and hybridization necessary aspects of cultural formation, and yet at the same time remain committed to the notion of an immutable national spirit?’ Barto´k’s solution to this problem comes through a brand of metaphysics centred on what Brown calls ‘the magical aspect of the noble savage fetish.’ She describes how Barto´k (1924) writes about this in The Hungarian Folk Song in connection with the intermixture of peasant musics: ‘borrowed elements undergo a certain transformation, so long as they do not constitute mere sporadic outcrops but take firm root among the peasant class, spread, and endure.’ (Brown, 2000, p. 134). In 1942 Barto´k elaborated on this: ‘The trend toward transformation of foreign melodies prevents the internationalization of the music of these peoples.’ Brown adds that even though new melodies inevitably come into contact with various peasant musics, the ‘home’ music is always capable of transforming the ‘new’ music into its own type. Never specified in technical terms, the notion of ‘spirit’ exists mainly at the level of a special positive aura of the natural that can be transferred from peasant music to art music by genius. She concludes: At this level, his idea is part of a vo¨lkisch formulation firmly rooted in 19th century thought. It is as if we are invited to draw a parallel between the ‘transforming’ folk spirit and the genius of art music composers who draw on folk music; we are invited to consider Bartok’s compositional activities as a high art equivalent of the (imagined) musical activities of the peasants he idealized. (Brown, 2000, p. 134) For Sharp the magical or unifying metaphysic is ‘beauty.’ Karpeles addresses the issue of ‘beauty’ as a reconciling force centrally in her second chapter on the Appalachian excursions, using this concept to paper over Sharp’s obvious failure to find the necessary direct musical linkages to the English folk tradition. She cautiously suggests: Whether they have suffered a sea-change, or whether they represent English folk music of an earlier period

64 is open to argument. A large proportion are cast in the pentatonic scale. They are more rugged and austere than the English tunes; less mellow, but no less beautiful, although their beauty is not perhaps so obvious. (Karpeles, 1967, p. 177) Karpeles addressed criticism of Sharp’s romanticization of Appalachian life by referring to his lectures on the subject: there were usually some sceptics in his audiences. ‘‘Surely’’, they said, ‘‘he is looking at these people through rose-coloured spectacles.’’ Yet he was only describing human beings in their natural state; but in our ordinary lives the real person gets so covered over with the veneer of civilization that when he is shown us naked and unadorned we do not always recognize him. ... With the eye of the artist Cecil Sharp saw beneath the surface, and where some might have seen only poverty, dirt, and ignorance, he saw humanity, beauty, and art. To Cecil Sharp it was axiomatic that any natural and sincere human expression must be beautiful. Or, as a woman in Kentucky put it, on hearing that the ballad of ‘‘The Death of Queen Jane,’’ which she had just been singing, was founded on historical fact: ‘‘There now, I always said it must be true because it is so beautiful.’’ (Karpeles, 1967, p. 177) In this justification of Sharp’s work, authenticity in tradition has been transformed, though a concept of truth in nature, to a justification of authenticity in beauty. The folksongs of Appalachia must represent an authentic tradition simply because they are invested with an inherent beauty. In turn, these interpretations are justified by reference to the exquisite judgment of the collector – Sharp himself – as the embodied creative genius.7

Conclusion This chapter has traced the way that particular constructions of the ‘folk’ influenced the activities of folk music collectors and then applied those notions to Cecil Sharp’s collecting activities in the Appalachians. The tensions and contradictions inherent in von Herder’s formulation have had long-term implications for the cultural politics of folk music collection. In particular, the Herderian tradition, coupled with formulations by scholars such as Francis Child and Cecil Sharp, directed the collectors’ gaze and the things that they found valuable. As British and American experience from the turn of the 20th century showed, some types of music, particularly ballads, were validated by narratives of cultural authenticity and, therefore, collected and cherished. Other types, including church music, children’s rhymes, parlour songs and work songs, which failed to fit these selective canons of value, were deemed less valuable and set aside. This process of selectivity might meet certain academic objectives, but undoubtedly

provided a partial view of the true diversity of music of rural areas, whether in the US or Europe. When examining Cecil Sharp’s activities specifically, further tensions were noted. In particular, even apparently liberal versions of the folk, as exemplified by Sharp, were overlain with exotic imaginative constructs and even a sense of exploitation – of collectors making use of what they saw for their own ends. In addition, there were problems associated with cultural hybridity and the nation. In the case of Sharp, as for Barto´k, the search for purity in the face of uncompromising cultural hybridity had somehow to be resolved. The end products invoke lasting problems for folk music interpretation, which revolve around questions of authenticity. Accepting canons of authenticity pushes us towards notions of purity whereas accepting plurality and the melting pot pushes us towards deconstruction of the folk itself. These are difficult matters to resolve. These various tensions came together when interpreting the results of Sharp’s Appalachian trips. It is now widely recognized that the music of Appalachia was much more varied than Sharp believed and that the history that it tells can be actively contested. Nevertheless, it does not detract from the enormous contribution of Sharp and other collectors to recognize that their approach to collecting folk music was ideologically constructed and that this greatly influenced the nature and purpose and, more importantly, the results of their search. Today it would seem to require a truly stunning turn of imagination to go to Appalachia and find oneself confronted by ‘Olde England,’ as Sharp claimed after just 3 days of collecting. Yet in context, there was nothing particularly surprising in what Sharp was doing. Authenticity in tradition would translate into authenticity in nature and the universalist part of his argument told Sharp that this could occur wherever the conditions were right. It would be some years before Sharp, like other collectors, would allow himself to take the first steps towards rethinking the more particularist elements of his arguments. When Sharp and others like him did so, as the parallel with Barto´k shows, they might even come to cherish the cultural hybridity that they would have preferred to suppress initially.

Notes 1. See also the above quotation from the publicity of the film Songcatcher (2001), directed by Maggie Greenwood and produced by Lions Gate Films/ Trimark Pictures. The film was based on a fictionalized version of the life and work of Olive Dame Campbell, who features in this chapter as a vital catalyst for the work of Cecil Sharp. We are conscious, too, that this paper concentrates primarily on folk song collecting rather than dealing in detail with other issues that are of considerable interest in the study of Appalachian music, such as the construction of the songs, the distinctive instru-

65

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

mentation and the role of women musicians. For more on these subjects, see Ritchie (1997), Becker (1998), Bean (2001), Patterson (2001), and Straw and Blethen (2004). Initial biographical works mained a hagiographic approach to Sharp’s work and thinking (e.g., see Strangways and Karpeles, 1933; Karpeles, 1967). More recent work places Sharp’s approach, attitudes and reputation under more critical scrutiny, although not necessarily unsympathetically (e.g., Harker, 1982, 1985; Szczelkun, 1993; Bearman, 2000; Francmanis, 2002). There are no precise boundaries of Appalachia as a cultural region. Politically, the establishment of the Appalachian Regional Commission by the US Government in 1965 applied the name ‘Appalachia’ to a 200,000 square-mile region: far greater than that identified here. This region, with a combined population of nearly 23 million in 2000, encompassed all of West Virginia as well as parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi (Drake 2001; Smith, 2003). There is no room here to deal with a parallel theme, which was the recasting of a quintessentially American ballad form, the cowboy song, into the guise of a ‘British past’ by viewing the cowboy as a modern ‘Anglo-Saxon knight.’ See Lomax (1910) and commentary by Malone (1979, pp. 29–30). Whisnant’s conclusions here are very similar to those of Harker in the context of Sharp’s English collecting (see above). In relation to the US, Tallia´n observes a degree of irony here. Speculating on the reasons why Barto´k had little appeal in the US either as a composer or folklorist, he points to the confusion of redrawn boundaries in the ‘geo-political chaos’ of Bartok’s bibliography as a source of confusion for Americans: his non-existent little Hungary could in no way serve as a model for the ‘great’ music of an American in search of a national identity (Tallia´n, 1995, p. 109). In this respect Georgiana Boyes (1993, p. 125) has recognized a wider significance and greater influence of Sharp as a cultural leader in Britain. In particular, she relates this to the sustained advocacy of the value of ‘beautifully sufficient culture ... (the) home-made civilization of the rural English’ associated with the influential reforming literary critics of Scrutiny founded in 1932 by a group that included F.R. Leavis (Boyes, 1993, pp. 126–130). There are parallels here with Theodore Adorno’s support of Barto´k as representing an authentic grounded modernism in contrast to Stravinsky’s perceived synthetic abstraction (Botstein, 1995, p. 9).

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