This article examines the practice of Cecil Sharp as a collector of folk songs, focusing primarily on his fieldwork in Somerset and secondarily on his Appalachian expeditions. Criticism by modern academics of his methods in the field, his editing of songs for publication, and his relationships with the singers themselves are considered and contested in the light of previously unexplored sources, including lecture notes and correspondence.
In 1956, the American folk musician and activist Pete Seeger sent a letter to the calypso musician and Trinidadian politician Raymond Quevedo (sobriquet Atilla the Hun), thus initiating a correspondence that would continue over the next several years until Quevedo's death in 1962. Seeger was particularly interested in learning the melody for Atilla's song titled 'Guardian Beauty Contest', a scathing commentary on race relations, especially views of Black women, in the British colony of Trinidad and Tobago. The lyrics so resonated with Seeger that he used Atilla's calypso as a protest song in the emerging American Civil Rights movement. This article considers the relationship between the two musicians within the broader contexts of anti-colonial, Black Nationalist, and desegregation messaging in folk music circles of the 1940s and 1950s.
Angela Carter, one of the greatest British post-war novelists, is already well known for her modern treatment of traditional folk and fairy tales. A new private archive, containing notebooks, LPs, books, and recordings, has recently come to light in Bristol which proves beyond doubt that Carter played an active role in the traditional folk scene in Bristol during the 1960s as a singer, a player, and a scholar, alongside her first husband, producer and field recordist Paul Carter. As part of a wider study of the influence of folk singing on Carter's literary works, this article examines how Carter the editor and curator learned from folk song collectors how to repurpose traditional material, and in particular from A. L. Lloyd, who performed as a guest at the Carters' Bristol folk club.
In this essay, I want to revisit the theme of 'truth in song', identified by Herbert Halpert in his seminal 1939 article. Since songs first entered print, tension has existed between the event as related and the documented facts of the incident to which a song refers. Twentieth-century folk song scholars have widened this dialectic on the nature of truth in a song text to encompass other key factors, namely context and performance, as a means of understanding a song's function and meaning, thereby acknowledging the importance of the extratextual information that certain singers attach to particular songs. The notorious 1840 Glasgow Railway Murder, to which the song 'Green the Ganger' (Roud 30616) relates, still resonates today through scholarly articles and documentary dramatization. Just as the performance of the song `McCaffery' (Roud 1148) was perceived as undermining the military establishment, so a rendition of 'Green the Ganger' might provide the flashpoint for unrest among Irish migratory workers in the construction industry. This paper reflects on the power of truth in such songs in the light of the performer and their audience.
This study recounts the history of the Polesworth Morris Troupe throughout its life from 1910 to 1915, with details of performances and repertoire. The troupe's relationship with the teaching of the Esperance Club is examined, casting light on the practices of the latter in instructing morris, not just in Polesworth. It is suggested that the Polesworth Troupe created something approaching Mary Neal's ideal of the people' taking up and performing traditional music and dance.
In 1950, Maud Karpeles embarked on a song collecting expedition to the Appalachian Mountains with the American scholar and fieldworker Sidney Robertson Cowell. Their plan was to retrace the journeys made by Karpeles with Cecil Sharp over thirty years earlier and to revisit some of the singers they had met previously, with the aim of making tape recordings on a machine supplied by the Library of Congress. Although many of the people they targeted were dead or otherwise indisposed, they succeeded in recording fifteen survivors or close relatives of singers encountered by Sharp, and a few unknown to him. Their accounts of the trip, in diaries and letters, reveal personal tensions and a fundamentally different view of the nature of folk song, Karpeles's purist approach contrasting with Cowell's view of a dynamic tradition. Karpeles revisited the mountains in 1955 with Evelyn Wells and succeeded in adding to the total of recordings. The material they collected provides a valuable snapshot of Appalachian ballad singing at this time.
Lacemakers sang while working at their pillows; this stereotype is amply confirmed in collections of folk songs made from lacemakers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not just in England but also in France, Germany, and, above all, Belgium. While the habit continued into adult life, lacemakers first contracted the practice in the institutions where lace skills were taught, such as lace schools. In Catholic Europe, lace schools were usually under some kind of ecclesiastical authority, which put them in the front line of the nineteenth-century culture wars. Church and state, liberals and conservatives, battled over the purposes and means of education, and particularly girls' education. Consequently, the repertoire of songs used in lace schools became a fraught political issue. This article considers one attempt to shape young minds through song. Constant Duvillers was the priest of Middelburg in East Flanders, in the newly established kingdom of Belgium, during the crisis years of the 'Hungry Forties'. Like hundreds of other members of the Catholic clergy, his response to growing poverty was to set up a lace school. He also wrote songs for use by the girls, which were taken up by other Flemish lace schools. All of Duvillers's songs were set in and around the Middelburg lace school and concern recognizable persons and actual events. They read like a soap opera, as an increasingly exasperated Duvillers cajoled, harangued, or outright insulted his pupils and their parents. This village drama provides a microcosm of the nineteenth century's culture wars: it illustrates the difficulties faced by the clergy as they attempted to impose their vision of education, proper gender roles, and the social order on their parishioners. Yet one measure of Duvillers's lasting influence is that several of his songs survived in lacemakers' repertoires until the mid-twentieth century.
