Cecil Sharp
Cecil Sharp
(1859-1924)
Cecil James Sharp is probably the best-known collector of British folk songs, often referred to as the “founding father” of the first folk revival. He was born in Denmark Hill, South London, to James and Jane Sharp, both keen music lovers. He attended Uppingham School before starting a mathematics degree at Clare College, Cambridge.
In October 1882, he left for Australia where he lived for nearly ten years, working as Associate to the Chief Justice of South Australia and then as a partner in a private venture, the Adelaide College of Music. There, despite his lack of formal musical training, he taught singing and music theory, in his spare time writing compositions of his own and conducting with the Adelaide Philharmonia Society.
In 1893, the year he married Constance Birch, Cecil was engaged as a music teacher by Ludgrove School, a preparatory school in North London. It was on Boxing Day 1899, when Cecil Sharp’s lifelong involvement with folk music began. He was staying with his mother-in-law in Oxford and happened to see the Headington Quarry Morris Men performing a set of dances. He was fascinated and called back their musician, William Kimber, to notate the tunes and later arrange them. Within two years of this encounter he had joined the Folk-Song Society and a year later had published A Book of British Song, which demonstrated his interest in folk music and the uses to which it could be put in the blossoming mass public education system. Back in London now, he prepared lectures and attracted much coverage in newspaper articles. By 1907 English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions was published, establishing him as an expert in the field. In 1911, Cecil founded the English Folk Dance Society, which together with the Folk-Song Society, forms the basis of the English Folk Dance and Song Society today.
Although a relative latecomer to the folk revival, Cecil Sharp became the most high profile and certainly most prolific folk music and dance collector of his contemporaries, yet personally he disliked being in the limelight. He noted down 4977 tunes in all, including nearly 3,000 songs from England and over 1,500 on his and Maud Karpeles’ four collecting trips to America’s Appalachian Mountains (1915-18). Much of this work was carried out at his own expense or with the help of meagre grants from benefactors.
Cecil Sharp died in 1924. Despite being a controversial figure, his collection of folk songs, tunes and dances is exceptional.
His manuscripts, notebooks, and artefacts reside in Clare College, University of Cambridge and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London. The Principal period covered is 1903-1924 and the geographical coverage is of England as well as the Appalachian states of USA.
Browse Cecil Sharp's collection in The Full English digital archive.
