A Genealogy of Folk Song Collecting in Nova Scotia
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Chapter One, The Folk Song in Nova Scotia and Stan Rogers’ Fogarty’s Cove
A revised version of my honours thesis at Saint Francis Xavier University, accepted April 2016. I was supervised by Dr. Laurie Stanley-Blackwell (StFX), and my second reader was Dr. Ian Rocksborough-Smith (now of University of the Fraser Valley). If you have feedback you’d like to share, feel free to write me at chris.greencorn [at] mail.utoronto.ca or find me on Twitter (@chrisgreencorn).
Folk song collecting in Nova Scotia emerged out of well-established Anglo-American folkloristic practice, with ideological roots in the French Enlightenment and German romantic nationalism. Through conduits like Francis James Child especially, but also George Lyman Kittredge, and his student at Harvard University, W. Roy Mackenzie, the idea of the ballad-singing “Folk” as vessels of the unadulterated cultural core of a nation trickled down from seventeenth-century Europe into twentieth-century Nova Scotia. The collecting activity of Cecil Sharp in England and Appalachia, and subsequently Maud Karpeles in Newfoundland, would introduce a more musicological approach, in contrast to the Harvard scholars whose interests were primarily literary, but the ideological assumptions of both lineages would remain influential in delimiting “authentic” folk music in Nova Scotia in the middle of the twentieth century — in spite of their differences. From the beginning, however, the isolation of folk songs from the mass of supposedly inferior popular music has been a process fraught with problems, which will be explored in this chapter.
In his 1994 monograph, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia, Ian McKay provides an outline of the intellectual history of Nova Scotian folk song collecting.¹ This chapter will follow the general trajectory of McKay’s argument, but delve deeper into the sources he used in an attempt to highlight the ideological nuances among individual collectors and the frequently arbitrary definition of “folk song” itself. Doing this will provide a more representative lens than might otherwise be afforded by McKay’s ideological analysis through which one can contextualize the relationship between Nova Scotian folklore collector Helen Creighton’s prescriptive definition of Nova Scotian folk song and, subsequently, the integrative approach to Nova Scotian music employed by the late Ontarian singer-songwriter, Stan Rogers.
Citing the work of Italian historian Giuseppe Cocchiara, McKay makes the compelling point that the genesis of the idea of “the Folk” — an Other to modern civility, an isolated subset of society, but one which unknowingly was a vessel for humanity’s pure, uncorrupted nature and culture — was in the continuing discovery of the Americas in the sixteenth century.² In a particularly telling passage, Cocchiara, in his History of Folklore in Europe, quotes from Michel de Montaigne’s Essais on the nature of Brazilian indigenous peoples:
[They] are wild, just as we call wild the fruits that nature has spontaneously produced; actually, however, those that we have altered by our artifice and led away from the common order are the ones we should call wild. The former retain, alive and vigorous, the truths and the most useful natural virtues and proprieties which we in our society have adulterated and modified to please our corrupted taste.³
Montaigne’s view of indigenous Brazilians was a romantic one, even as early as 1580. Through Marc Lescarbot’s History of New France, and Paul Le Jeune, Charles Lallemant, and others in the Relations des Jésuites, literature from New France would fix the “Noble Savage” in the European consciousness well into the 1600s.⁴
Slowly, a string of French philosophers, including Pierre Bayle, Bernard de Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and finally Rousseau, would rework this external referent into a domestic entity: “The times of which I speak are very distant,” wrote Rousseau, in his Discours sur l’inégalité, to his fellow man; “how much you are altered from what you were!”⁵ Cocchiara states that Rousseau specifically was “convinced that old customs … [were] a genuine treasure, which, once lost, [could] never be recovered.” His concern for the fallen state of man and the loss of precious cultural antiquities was a clear precedent for “the Folk” in French Enlightenment thought.
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, “the Folk” was formalized in German philosophical literature. Philip Bohlman, in his work The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World, described Johann von Herder’s notion of das Volk — “the Folk”, literally — which imagined a people “‘wild’ and ‘lacking in political organization’ (unpolizirt)” but “closer to nature so that they could be more responsive to ‘nature’s poetry’ (Naturpoesie).”⁶ If von Herder considered das Volk “closer to nature,” consequently, der Volkslieder (“folk songs”), which were their response to Naturpoesie, were intrinsically tied to nature. Distilling von Herder’s philosophy, Bohlman wrote that the music of das Volk “encapsulated the cultural core before society complicated it.”[7] Thus, der Volkslieder were not only tied to nature; they themselves were natural, authentic.
In his History of Folklore in Europe, Cocchiara wrote that “one hears in Herder the echo of Rousseau,” and that the German philosopher was “captivated by Rousseau’s Discours.” There is very clearly an ideological link between the two, but it is important to note that von Herder’s Volk was a substantially more conservative concept than Rousseau’s “savage.” As Cocchiara put it, “in Herder’s work Rousseau’s ‘mighty drama’ dissolved into a tranquil dream.” His primitivism was obvious well before the publication of his collection of Volkslieder, itself ironically a fairly international assemblage of folk music. In 1765, he wrote that his desire was chiefly “to be an honest man, owning his own hut and vineyard in the peaceful shade of the throne, and rejoicing in the rewards of his own labour, the source of one’s happiness and comfort.”⁸
It is from von Herder, by way of his successors in nationalistic folk culture collecting, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, that the American literary scholar Francis James Child inherited the view that folk songs were the product of a primeval, preliterate antecedent of modern, civilized society. Child, the eighth son of a Boston sailmaker, had a precocious intellectual ability that was noticed by his school headmaster, and the boy was groomed to enter Harvard College, where he studied and excelled in classics, English, and mathematics, and upon graduation was appointed to be a college tutor. Between 1849 and 1851, Child went abroad, where he became familiar with German philology and folkloristics. He returned to a professorship at his alma mater, and from that time began to compile British folk songs, in all their variants.⁹
George Lyman Kittredge, another professor at Harvard and a disciple of Child, made perhaps the most succinct connection between his mentor, Grimm, and von Herder. In the biographical introduction to the first volume of Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Kittredge wrote that Child’s “greatest contribution to learning, [the Popular Ballads], may even, in a very real sense, be regarded as the fruit of [his] years in Germany.” This proposition is substantiated by Kittredge’s subsequent description of a picture of the Grimms that sat permanently on Child’s mantel.¹⁰
After its initial publication in 1882, The English and Scottish Folk Ballads would became the de facto authoritative resource on British folk songs. Kittredge called it Child’s “crowning work.”¹¹ Stretching over five volumes, it was, by the author’s assertion, the most comprehensive effort to collect, organize, and publish British folklore to that point. Child wrote in the introduction to his first volume that the “unrestricted title” was warranted because he had “at command every valuable copy of every known ballad.”¹² Child pulled the material for his magnum opus from a variety of sources. The greater portion was drawn from manuscripts, broadsides, and from the collections of other ballad enthusiasts, rather than directly from singers: “Enough was done,” wrote Kittredge, “to make it clear that little or nothing [remained] to be recovered in this way.”¹³ Drawing from written sources that recorded a primarily oral medium required stringent criteria to determine which ballads were “ancient” and truly popular, rather than “the works of the professional ballad-maker.”¹⁴ Walter Morris Hart’s article “Professor Child and the Ballad,” printed as a sort of post-script to the Popular Ballads in its Dover editions, summarized Child’s definition of the popular ballad as given in his entry for “Ballad Poetry” in Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia in 1874, and consequently gives some insight into his methodology.
Harkening back to von Herder, Hart wrote that Child “regarded [the popular ballad] as a distinct species of poetry which precedes the poetry of art, as the product of a homogenous people, the expression of our common human nature, [and] of the mind and heart of the people,” rather than of the individual subjectivity. It was again the “cultural core before society complicated it.” Those ancient ballads, which preceded art, were spontaneous, inimitable, and devoid of the subject; thus the “author [counted] for nothing.”¹⁵ Though he strayed from Jacob Grimm’s theory of communal composition and transmission, Child’s collection of ballads was the Anglo-American realization of von Herder’s hypothetical German Volksleider. However, Child went further than von Herder or the Grimms towards a prescriptive definition of the folk song.
His was a definition by negation. The two important positive criteria were that a true ballad’s subject matter was exclusively that which appeared in the popular literature, and that it had parallels in foreign folk culture. More important was what it was not. Hart wrote, again summarizing Child, that
the true ballad does not deal in extravagance, or exaggeration, or platitude; it is not prosaic, over-refined, cynical, sophisticated, sentimental, unnatural, trite or moral, though the “pungent buckishness” of the broadside, and the gay cynicism of the minstrel, are foreign to it.
Further, the ballad
must have a plot, [though] conclusion, transitions, and preliminaries may be omitted; but the result is not nonsense, the ballad is not incoherent. At its best it is, however, brief. It is careless of geography, and, except in some … of the Robin Hood ballads, it touches Setting lightly.¹⁶
“True” folk songs were without politics or pretense. They were harmless, and only to be found among those whom the Andersonian trio of “print, Protestantism, and science” had left behind.¹⁷
The “Child ballads”, as the 305 archetypal songs comprising the English and Scottish Popular Ballads are known, were what George Kittredge, Roy Mackenzie, Cecil Sharp, Maud Karpeles, and Helen Creighton would all set out to find in their respective locales. For all its prescriptive imperative, however, the category was troublesome at best. Though Child acknowledged that “[i]n transmission the ballad regularly departs from the regular form,” variation was greater and more detrimental when the text was transmitted by writing rather than by the “mouths of unlearned people … when it has come down by purely domestic tradition.”¹⁸ The idea then, when dealing with written sources, was to find the oldest and most “intact” version, the Ur-text from which all variations were derived, and document and cross-reference all differing versions.
The substantial majority of Child’s sources, unfortunately, were manuscripts and broadsides.¹⁹ In a similarly contradictory manner, despite his distaste for the vulgarity of the broadside ballad collections of Roxburghe and Pepys, which he flatly denouncedto be to “veritable dunghills,”²⁰ and, “from a literary point of view, thoroughly despicable and worthless,”²¹ Hart wrote that Child saw the inclusion of broadsides as permissible since they were “always founded on tradition,” even if it “seriously enfeebled” the ballad.²² Additionally, it was clear to Child that
many of the ballads of the now most refined nations had their origins in that class whose acts and fortunes they depict — the upper classes — though the growth of civilization has driven them from the memory of the highly polished and instructed, and has left them as an exclusive possession to the uneducated.²³
Ideologically, Child’s canon was problematic, and it seems clear that the criteria for admission were bent if not disregarded for the sake of convenience.
However, it became the predominant model for Anglo-American folk song collecting. George Lyman Kittredge, cited above, was in no small part responsible for preventing Child’s Popular Ballads from fading into obscurity. Kittredge had arrived at Harvard in 1888; by this time, Child had published four parts of the Popular Ballads and was working on a fifth. Kittredge, it would appear, “became very much involved in the project.”²⁴ Foreshadowed by intermittent “disturbances of health,”²⁵ Child himself died before the last installment of his ten-part collection was completed. It was Kittredge who, pressed by Houghton Mifflin and “[i]n accordance with Professor Child’s desire and at the request of his family,” ensured that the final volume was published.²⁶ Kittredge also took up a number of Child’s classes, including his course on ballads. Esther K. Birdsall wrote that the “influence of this course on American folklore activates cannot be overestimated.” It was in this capacity that Kittredge would meet John A. Lomax and turn him on to a career in ballad hunting.²⁷ A young W. Roy Mackenzie would study under the then-venerable professor as well.²⁸
Mackenzie was born in 1883 in River John, Pictou County, Nova Scotia, to a “comfortably middle-class family.” After graduating from Dalhousie University in Halifax in 1902, where he had been a student of Archibald MacMechan, he studied English at the graduate level at Harvard, where he fell under the tutelage of Kittredge. Primed to recognize the Child ballads, it was actually his wife, Mary Ethel (née Stuart), who reminded him of the resemblance of the songs he had learned as a child to the “genuine old stock.”²⁹ In a presumably similar fashion to the “Yankee-style patronage” that Lomax had benefited from,³⁰ Mackenzie was encouraged by Kittredge to return to River John and collect ballads, and in doing so, he, as McKay notes, “opened a direct channel of influence for the Harvard Literary School (and through it the Child canon and the German essentialist tradition) to Nova Scotia.”³¹ A full ten years before publishing his book, The Quest of the Ballad, Mackenzie prepared a sketch of his experience collecting in Nova Scotia’s Pictou and Colchester Counties, again with the endorsement of his professor.
“Ballad-Singing in Nova Scotia” (1909), published in the Journal of American Folklore, set a remarkably different tone than Child or Kittredge had with the Popular Ballads, one that, broadly, would be indicative of ballad collecting practice in North America thereafter. First, Mackenzie conducted fieldwork, which was in its own right a revolutionary change in practical orientation for university-educated, Anglo-American folk song collectors. He also gave significant attention to indigenous songs and to broadsides on their own terms, rather than insisting on a restrictive definition like “popular ballad.” In addition to this, he acknowledged the interaction among different immigrant groups, both in terms of acquiring songs and the ethnic and socio-economic distinctions that presented themselves in the given communities. Finally, he gave the ballad-singers precedence in his article rather than focusing on the songs themselves, highlighting the importance of the individual tradition-bearer. The article was not without blatant stereotyping or condescension, but it was a substantially different way of approaching the topic than had been done by Child.
Mackenzie’s first book, The Quest of the Ballad, followed in 1919 and, though substantially longer, continued in much the same format. Despite his greater focus on the ballad-singer, as in “Ballad-Singing in Nova Scotia”, he had nevertheless gone about his collecting interested primarily in the literary aspects of the songs, in the way that Kittredge and Child had done before him. Therefore, while there were lyrics to many ballads included in the text, as sung by the people of Pictou County, Mackenzie provided no melody or tune to accompany the songs. He himself noted this as a painful deficiency; specifically, on the occasion of the first song that he put to paper, a variant of the broadside “Van Dieman’s Land.” Mackenzie wrote:
This is one of the few occasions on which I have witnessed the satisfactory — I might say the ideal — rendition of a ballad, and my memory of the composite performance of old James [the singer] and his wife [present at the time] is to me rather more valuable than is the somewhat debased and sentimentalized ballad which I carried away. It is only when a ballad is rendered by a singer of the old school in the presence of one or more listeners who have by chance survived with him that the full significance of ballad-singing can be realized. The total effect is infinitely greater than that suggested by the unanimated ballad which is transmitted to the page, or even by the words with the music.³²
Unfortunately, he does not provide the latter. He goes on, however, to capture the inseparability of ballad and performance:
It is both of these plus the emotion of the singer and listeners, an emotion manifested by the latter, sometimes in ejaculatory comments, and sometimes in an unconscious or excited joining of forces with the singer in the tradition of a line or refrain. In this harmony between the singer and his audience one may see, if one is as fortunate as I have been, a clear suggestion of that older and more complete harmony which the dust of many centuries has so obscured for us, and which we have vaguely described as “the spirit of the throng.”³³
While clearly still rooted in the notion of a sort of communal spirit and origin among the lower classes, again Mackenzie probed farther into the social aspects of ballad singing.
In his Ballads and Sea Songs of Nova Scotia (1928), Mackenzie focused less on the narrative of folk song collecting. Structurally, Ballads and Sea Songs of Nova Scotia bore more resemblance to Child’s Popular Ballads, and specifically Kittredge’s one-volume edition. Interestingly, only the first sixteen of the 162 songs therein were Child ballads, the following being either broadsides or endemic to the Maritimes and New England. For those he provided diligent annotations, to the extent where some, like no. 78, “Paul Jones,” are longer than the songs themselves. He also provided 42 “folk tunes”, which is to say melodies transcribed from the Nova Scotian ballad singers.³⁴ Despite the transition to a more musicological approach (perhaps influenced by his English contemporaries), Martin Lovelace writes that The Quest of the Ballad “contains so much evidence of Mackenzie’s understanding of singers and their relationships to their songs that we must regret that he wrote no more on the subject.”³⁵
At roughly the same time as Mackenzie, Cecil Sharp was following a similar tack in England.³⁶ Sharp was the eldest boy in a family of nine, and, like Mackenzie, was born into a respectable family, though nearly a quarter-century earlier. His father was a slate merchant, and able to afford to send the young Sharp to a number of private schools and thence to Clare College at Cambridge. Sharp trained there in mathematics and music, and graduated with Third Class Honours. For a stint he lived in Adelaide, Australia, where he directed a number of musical ensembles and headed a private music school. After returning to England and teaching there for some time, Sharp became aware of folk music more or less by accident, in Headington, outside Oxford, upon being exposed to a team of Morris dancers in 1899.³⁷ In 1903, at the behest of his friend from Australia, Reverend Charles Marson, he travelled to Marson’s vicarage in Hambridge, Somerset. Importantly, it was there that he collected his first folk song, from the minister’s gardener, aptly titled “The Seeds of Love.”³⁸
Sharp was not the first to collect ballads in England, by any means: the earliest collection of Robin Hood ballads appeared at the end of the fifteenth century; as alluded to above, Pepys collected broadsides in the seventeenth century and the Roxburghe collection was assembled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the same year (1765) that von Herder stated his preference for the “shadow of the throne,” Bishop Thomas Percy had published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry; closer to Sharp’s era, Frank Kidson, Sabine Baring-Gould, and Lucy Broadwood, among others, actively collected and published folk songs.³⁹ Interestingly, Derek Schofield, in his article “Sowing the Seeds: Cecil Sharp and Charles Marson in Somerset in 1903”, argues rather decisively that the occasion was not Sharp’s first exposure to ballad singing either, as is reported in a number of sources.⁴⁰ He had been teaching music classes in an Eton preparatory school since 1893, and Schofield makes an unimpeachable case (with photographic evidence) that Sharp’s students were using Arthur Somervell and Harold Boulton’s Songs of the Four Nations, which he greatly admired, at the time. Schofield also quotes from Sharp’s correspondence with Thomas Lennox Gilmour on the day following Sharp’s visit to the vicarage, describing his knowledge of variants of the songs he had collected the day before, which fully nullifies assertions of Sharp’s ignorance.⁴¹
It could well be argued that it was the first time that Sharp had heard a ballad sung traditionally, and experienced something closer to what W. Roy Mackenzie might have called the “total effect” of an “ideal rendition,” but we need not mired ourselves searching for a resolution to this moot point. The “Wassail Song peculiar to that village” that he had acquired was enough to alert him to the feasibility of collecting.⁴² From that point until the first publication of English Folk Songs: Some Conclusions, his authorial debut, he collected between twelve and thirteen hundred songs from more than 350 singers. A number of these were included in the text, with notated melodies; Sharp believed that “the balance, as between the respective claims of the words and the tunes, should be restored.”⁴³
With his assistant, Maud Karpeles, Sharp conducted a collecting exercise in the Appalachian region of the United States as well, over forty-six weeks between 1916 and 1918. In North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, the two collected about 1700 songs.⁴⁴ Through correspondence with his wife, Constance, it is apparent that Sharp was positively elated to have found what he considered a gold mine: a region littered with people “just English of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.” They walked, talked, and curtseyed like Georgian Brits, and sang songs that stretched back even further. Karpeles was particularly observant of their social and domestic arrangements, and reported, among other things, that their cleanliness left much to be desired.⁴⁵ The othering of the Appalachian ballad singers who had proved so unimaginably fortuitous to the pair is indicative of the Darwinian theoretical position they had adopted, and which Sharp had expounded in English Folk Songs: Some Conclusions.⁴⁶
Karpeles’ observations foregrounded a career of defending and at times revising Sharp’s positions and work after his death in June 1924. She lived until 1976, and often edited publications (or republications) of the work they had done together, as well as a number of editions of Sharp’s biography and his Conclusions.⁴⁷ Though Sharp himself championed the integration of folk song into school curricula and its dissemination in general while still living, it is through her continued scholarship that the model they had used became the standard for many, including Helen Creighton. Britta Sweers writes that, as a founding member of the International Folk Music Council, Karpeles enshrined Sharp’s definition of the folksong in their first draft policy nearly verbatim, “not only concerning the major criteria of continuation, variation, and selection, but even in the separation of traditional and popular music.”⁴⁸
By 1928, when Helen Creighton first travelled to Devil’s Island, just off the coast of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, the stage was set ideologically and methodologically for a career of folklore collecting in Nova Scotia. The conservative and romantic view of “the Folk” had been entrenched through lineages of both English and American ballad collectors. Much weight was given to the canon of Child ballads, but there was also acknowledgement (through Mackenzie, specifically) of the significant influence of broadsides and local ballads in the repertoire of the Nova Scotian ballad singer, a species, as it were, on the brink of extinction. When “[a] friend of the Mackenzies suggested that [Creighton] do for the rest of Nova Scotia what they had done for their area along the Northumberland Strait,” the young journalist seized the opportunity.⁴⁹
You can read the introduction, second and third chapters, and conclusion of this thesis by clicking through these links.
Notes
1. “The Idea of the Folk”, in Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 3–42.
2. Ibid., 9–10.
3. Montaigne, in Giuseppe Cocchiara, The History of Folklore in Europe, trans. John N. McDaniel (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981), 16.
4. Cocchiara, Folklore, 19–24.
5. Ibid., 90–92; 119.
6. Herder, quoted in Philip Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 6–7.
7. Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music, 54.
8. Cocchiara, Folklore, 171.
9. Dave Harker, “Francis James Child and the ‘Ballad Consensus,’” Folk Music Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (1981), 146–47
10. George Lyman Kittredge, “Francis James Child”, n.d., in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1965 [1882–84]), xxv.
11. Ibid.
12. Francis James Child, “Advertisement to Part 1,” in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 1, ed. Child (New York: Dover, 1965 [1882]), vii.
13. Kittredge, “Francis James Child,” xviii.
14. Child, in Roy Palmer, “‘Veritable Dunghills’: Professor Child and the Broadside,” Folk Music Journal, Vol. 7, no. 2 (1996), 157.
15. Walter Morris Hart, “Professor Child and the Ballad,” in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 5, ed. Child (New York: Dover, 1965), 804–805. Originally published in PMLA vol. XXI, no. 4 (1906), 755–807.
16. Ibid., 806.
17. Michael J. Bell, “‘No Borders to the Ballad-Maker’s Art’: Francis James Child and the Politics of People,” Western Folklore vol. 47, no. 4 (October, 1988), 292.
18. Hart “Professor Child”, 805.
19. Barker, “‘Ballad Consensus,’” 163. Note 9.
20. Palmer, “‘Dunghills,’” 157.
21. Bell, “Politics of People,” 295.
22. Hart, “Professor Child,” 804.
23. Bell “‘Politics of People,’” 294.
24. Esther K. Birdsall, “Notes on the Role of George Lyman Kittredge in American Folklore Studies,” Journal of the Folklore Institute vol. 10, no. ½ (Jun-Aug 1973), 58.
25. Child, “Advertisement to Part IX”, in Child, Popular Ballads, vol. 5.
26. George Lyman Kittredge, “Advertisement to Part X”, in Child, Popular Ballads, vol. 5.
27. Roger D. Abrahams, “Mr. Lomax Meets Professor Kittredge,” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 37, no. 2/3 (May-December, 2000), 99–100.
28. Helen Creighton, “Canada’s Maritime Provinces–An Ethnomusicological Survey (Personal Observations and Recollections),” Ethnomusicology, vol. 16, no. 3 (Sept. 1972), 404.
29. McKay, Quest of the Folk, 46–47; W. Roy Mackenzie, The Quest of the Ballad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1919), 63.
30. Abrahams, “Mr. Lomax,” 100.
31. McKay, Quest of the Folk, 47.
32. Quest of the Ballad, 41.
33. Ibid.
34. W. Roy Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs of Nova Scotia, (Hatboro, PA: Folklore Assoociates, Inc., 1963 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928]).
35. Martin Lovelace, “W. Roy Mackenzie as a collector of folksong,” Canadian Folk Music Journal, vol. 5 (1977), 7.
36. The following biographical information comes from David Harker’s two articles, “May Cecil Sharp Be Praised?” in History Workshop no. 14 (Autumnn, 1982), 44–62, and “Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Conclusions” in Folk Music Journal, vol. 2, no 3 (1972), 220–240.
37. Stan Rogers, in a segment of stage banter on Home In Halifax (Fogarty’s Cove Music, 1984) described Morris dancers as “cute little people who dress up in white suits — and they have little green sashes, and little porkpie hats with feathers in them, and they tie sleigh bells to their feet, and they tie hankies to their wrists — long white hankies, — and they kind of prance around. And they do this in groups, or mobs, called “teams” … There’s nothing really alarming about this except for the fact that every once in a while they will arm themselves with cudgels, or bludgeons, or some kind of blunt instrument like that, and to the accompaniment of accordion and violin, they will rhythmically and ritually hit each other again and again and again…”
38. Derek Schofield, “Sowing the Seeds: Cecil Sharp and Charles Marson in Somerset in 1903”, Folk Music Journal, vol. 8, no. 4 (2004), 484.
39. For more, see Britta Sweet, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 45; Schofield, “Sowing the Seeds,” 484.
40. For instance, in “Editor’s Preface”, in Sharp, English Folk Songs: Some Conclusions, Fourth Edition, ed. Maud Karpeles, (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing, 1965), xi.
41. Schofield, “Sowing the Seeds,” 486; 491.
42. Ibid., 491.
43. Sharp, Some Conclusions, xxiii.
44. Karpeles, “Editor’s Preface,” in ibid., x; John R. Gold and George Revill, “Gathering the voices of the people: Cecil Sharp, cultural hybridity, and the folk music of Appalachia,” GeoJournal vol. 65 (2006), 60.
45. Gold and Revill, “Gathering,” ibid. She also noted that women did not eat at the dinner table until the men present had finished, that men practiced polygamy, and that, in general, they were poor and illiterate.
46. Specifically in Ch. 3, “Evolution.”
47. A bibliography, though by no means extensive: Sharp, Some Conclusions, editions by Karpeles in 1954, 1965, and 1967; Fox Strangeways and Karpeles, Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work, editions in 1955, 1967; Sharp and Karpeles, Eighty English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, 1968; Karpeles, Cecil Sharp’s Collection of English Folk Songs, 1974.
48. Britta Sweers, Electric Folk, 48–49. Karpeles was a contemporary of Helen Creighton, and collected folk songs in Newfoundland in 1929–30; at the same time, Creighton was collecting in Halifax County. Following this trip, Karpeles published Folk Songs of Newfoundland (London: Oxford University Press, 1934). In a later edition of Folk Songs of Newfoundland (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), Karpeles expressed her disappointment with Newfoundland (17).
49. Creighton, “Canada’s Maritime Provinces,” 405.
© Chris Greencorn 2016, revised 2018