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This chapter details the history of the American Branch of the English Folk Dance Society (EFDS), as well as its clashes with the International Folk Dance movement. In the years between 1915 and 1918, Cecil Sharp had come to establish a cultural hegemony that emphasized the American Branch as the leading authority on folk dance. However, the American Branch of EFDS was but one of many ethnic urban folk centers among a wide range of immigrant cultures with folk dance traditions. One person in particular embodied the alternative vision of an International Folk Dance of the peoples of many lands, and she found herself as the center of conflict with the American Branch, and most especially with Sharp: Elizabeth Burchenal.

This chapter discusses the establishment of the country dance movement on U.S. soil during the Progressive Era. It begins with Cecil Sharp's arrival in New York in 1914, although he had been preceded by visits from three other teacher-performers who were at once his protégés and competitors, and they embodied different expressions for the dance. Sharp prevailed, however, and his victory enshrined a particularly constrained bodily expression for English Country Dance that had a lasting impact on the shape and form of the dance in the United States. As important, though, Sharp put in place a leadership that embodied the nascent country dance movement with traditional gender roles and as white, Anglo-Saxon, and elite.

This chapter is an appeal on behalf of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) for the restoration of the Cecil Sharp House. The music which lived in their hearts was gradually discovered by musicians who were able to write it down and thus preserve it, for before that the songs had only existed in the minds of their singers. The chance came in 1904, when Cecil Sharp went down to Somerset and found that there, as indeed all over England, almost every village had its songs and dances—songs of classical beauty and dances that only an Englishman could dance. Now these songs and dances were in danger of being forgotten by the younger generation, and Cecil Sharp saw at once that this precious age-old heritage must be preserved in permanent form before it was too late, and not only preserved but given back to the people.

It is now nearly 50 years since Cecil Sharp startled England with Folk Songs from Somerset. Such a wealth of beauty as this volume, containing, to mention only a few, “High Germany,” “The False Bride,” “Searching for Lambs,” and “The Crystal Spring,” was something they had never dreamed of. Where did it all come from? The English knew, on the best authority, that folk music was “all either bad or Irish.” However, Sharp believed, and they believe, that there, in the fastnesses of rural England, was the well-spring of English music. There was already a Folk Song Society in existence which discussed traditional melodies and had to admit, rather shamefacedly, that some of these tunes sung by simple-minded rustics were “sweetly pretty.” It was left to Sharp to declare that here was something of supreme beauty which had grown up, as part of their life, with their language and customs.

A hybrid revival genre like electric folk illustrates the difficulty of a strict separation of art, folk, and popular music. This is also corroborated by a deeper analysis of the relationship between electric folk and traditional English music. This chapter starts out with a picture of traditional music as depicted by the collectors of the First Revival, Cecil Sharp in particular, whose definition was also adapted by the International Folk Music Council in 1954. Issues discussed here include: the ideal of a “pure” English folk music tradition, the separation of traditional music from popular/commercial music, the disappearance of the tradition, exclusiveness of oral transmission, the ideal of unaccompanied singing, editorial changes and notational aspects. Discussing several modern controversial perspectives on the relationship of traditional and popular music, including Dave Harker, Karl Dallas, Alan Lomax, and Simon Frith, the chapter argues for more a flexible application of the various concepts.

This chapter details American efforts to visit England in search of folk dance roots. These people encountered an exciting movement, but they were sometimes unwittingly the subject of disputes and sometimes appeared deliberately to aggravate the conflict. The most profound and earliest dispute involved the two people who took the lead in the revival in England, Mary Neal and Cecil Sharp. The English folk dance revival may properly be said to have begun with Mary Neal, a woman every bit as imposing and outspoken as Sharp. It was Neal's success with folk dance that reawakened his interest in dance in 1905. However, Neal's and Sharp's differences had a bearing on the history of the dance movement, most especially in the style and spirit of the dance. In both cases, Sharp would eventually proceed as the dance patriarch.

It has sometimes been questioned whether Cecil Sharp had the creative impulse in music, but his accompaniments to my mind clearly show that he had. His creative impulse came from the tune he was setting. In all the best of Sharp's accompaniments it is the tune that counts, and the arrangement falls into its proper background. In some cases his accompaniments look wrong, and sometimes even when played by themselves seem awkward, but they stand the important test: that they make the tune sound right. It is true that Sharp had little of the conventional technique of pianoforte accompaniment, as taught by professors of composition, but he developed a technique of his own whose complete success was only hindered by his fear of the harmony professor. As examples of first-rate accompaniments this book suggests “The Cuckoo,” “The Drowned Lover,” and “The Water is Wide.”

Cecil James Sharp, musician, author, and collector and arranger of English folk songs and dances, was born in London and was educated at Uppingham School and at Clare College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge he entered fully into the musical activities of the university. After taking his degree, Sharp went in 1882 to Adelaide, where he held the legal post of associate to the chief justice of South Australia. He was also during this period assistant organist of the cathedral and conductor of the Philharmonic Society. However, interest centres on the last 25 years of his life and in the gradual growth under his influence of the knowledge of the English traditional arts of music and dancing. In 1902 his experience as singing teacher at Ludgrove School led him to prepare and publish A Book of British Song. This contains both traditional melodies and “composed” music of a simple kind. A further book, Folk-Songs from Somerset, was published in 1904.

The revival of folk song and dance has been active for nearly 40 years. The folk dance and song stand or fall entirely on their intrinsic merits. This is one of the ways in which the folk song has evolved. Nobody wants an obscurantist policy; it should not be the object of the Society to recreate outward accidents of folk song and dance. The folk song as a concert singer sings it, the folk dance as a member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) dances it, is necessarily something different from the same tune or dance when collected from a traditional singer or dancer. Surely the dance has evolved, whether we wish it or no, from the first moment that Cecil Sharp taught, to a girl from a factory, steps that he had learnt from a country labourer.

Cecil Sharp collected over 5,000 tunes. Of these he published about 500 as being of genuine artistic value: a certain amount more he printed in scientific volumes for their archaeological or anthropological interest. Sharp did this because he saw that a tradition is not worth preserving unless it has certain permanent qualities which make it alive for the next generation. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) has two sides to its activities: the study of traditional art and its practice. This beauty is not to be perpetuated by mere slavish imitation of the traditional singer or dancer—a tradition may be half-forgotten or may be corrupted or be obscured by inefficient performance. The task of the EFDSS is twofold: scientific discovery and artistic presentation. There is a dangerous tendency rife among members of the EFDSS to take to its bosom everything that is supposed to be “folk,” regardless of its artistic value.

This chapter introduces some of the major threads that weave together to provide the complex fabric that is the history of English Country Dance (ECD) in the twentieth century. After a review of the material conditions in the industrial city at the end of the nineteenth century, in which calls for revival echoed, the chapter moves between themes that interweave at different stages in the history, and often to different effect. The discussion moves from discourses on the body to histories of reform to the folk revival, but one theme is never far from another. Concerns voiced by Progressive reformers over dangers from and to gendered bodies cross with interests in social control and cultural amelioration. And the romantic views of peasants and the folk mix with Anglo-Saxon and white imperial ambitions to revitalize the “race.”

It seems but yesterday that those pioneers founded the Folk Song Society; and yet, in those 50 years, a silent revolution has transformed England's musical life. Nevertheless, members of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) realize the change of heart that has taken place in the plain man of music, and it is the plain man whom they wish to capture; the experts are already converted. They hold in pious memory the names of Sabine Baring-Gould, Frank Kidson, and others, without whose spade work it is doubtful whether Cecil Sharp would have had the incentive to initiate his great campaign. It is these pioneers who brought the grist to the mill. Today the mills turn merrily, but without that substratum of knowledge, research, and artistic imagination the summer schools, the morris rings, and Albert Hall festivals, would be as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

The subjects of English folk songs—whether they deal with romance, tragedy, conviviality, or legend—have the background of nature and its seasons. When the lovers make love the plough boys are ploughing in the spring and the lark is singing. When May comes round the moment is appropriate to celebrate it in song. The succession of flowers in the garden provides symbols for the deserted lover. The festivity of the Harvest Home is celebrated in the allegory of “John Barleycorn.” The young maiden meets her dead lover among the storms and cold winds of autumn; and the joy of Christmas is set in its true background of frost and snow. The songs come from various sources from Cecil Sharp's Folk Songs from Somerset, and from the collections of Lucy Broadwood and Fuller Maitland.

This chapter describes Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles as they journeyed to find a trysting-place with England. Sharp saw North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee as lands free from enclosure, industrialization, urban blight, mass print, and class struggle. He described the land and people of Laurel County as an isolated, strong, spare, and wholesome community.

This chapter addresses the idea of England as espoused by what came to be known as the “First English Folk Revival” from the 1890s. With parallel developments in Europe and the USA it was in fact a much wider and deeper movement than this phrase suggests, and the chapter makes reference to this. At its heart however, was the notion that the authentic voice and feeling of the English people could be rediscovered in the historic music of the peasantry, captured and revived and streamed back into national life as a regenerative force. That the historical scholarship behind the idea was faulty, or that the English had long since ceased to be “peasants,” or that the vast majority of the English people did not share the revivalists’ devotion to the music, or the cause, did not seem to matter. A new national identity was in the making and the music had to be saved before agricultural depression and rural depopulation destroyed it forever.