Folk Song and Dance
By H. W. NEVINSON
CECIL SHARP was a very remarkable man, and the results of his life have been even more remarkable than himself. If of anyone, it can be said of him that his works do follow him. To thousands of English people they have given unexpected delight in our traditional arts of movement to music and expression in song. In every county one may now find a centre of folk-dance, and in most counties of folk-song too. The result has not been a revival so much as a restoration of a fine heritage that belongs to the whole English people by right of race, and but for Cecil Sharp's discernment and energy might have been despised and ultimately lost. I was, unhappily, born too soon to take full advantage of the movement in all its forms, but I was just in time to discover the peculiar pleasure of moving in regular patterns to ancestral music that lives in our blood. A puritanical upbringing forbade my dancing in any form, but the young of this century suffer no hindrance from puritanism, and Cecil Sharp has recovered for them a form of extraordinary beauty and attraction.
The history of the man and the movement is here told* in accurate detail and with musical knowledge by Mr. Fox Strangways in collaboration with Miss Maud Karpeles, who travelled far and wide with Cecil Sharp in collecting the songs and dances, and is herself the model of what a folk-dancer should be. No one could speak with higher authority on the narrative and musical side than the two authors combined. They show us a man who appears to have been guided to his high function in life by a series of divine accidents. At Cambridge, in Adelaide, and again in various schools and colleges of England he was known for his musical powers and a rare gift of teaching, but his destiny remained obscure to himself till on Boxing Day, 1899, he was accidentally on Headington Hill just outside Oxford, and saw a group of Morris Dancers dancing on the road, while William Kimber played a concertina for the tune. Mr. Kimber was then twenty- seven, and it was good to hear him still playing the concertina at the splendid ceremony of Folk Dance and Song in the Albert Hall last Saturday. The point of that first meeting at Headin,gton was that Cecil Sharp had the genius to recognize the hidden beauties of the English folk-dances, and from that (lite the interest of exploration rapidly became zeal.
A similar " divine accident " occurred when he was staying with a friend in Somerset and heard the gardener singing to himself " The Seeds of Love." Here was another by-pass opened into the very heart of the English people, and the collection of the folk-songs followed the collection of the dances. Beginning with Somerset, where the traditional songs lingered in greatest number, he wandered throughout the counties, reviving the memories of old and young in the cottages and gypsy tents (seldom in the pubs, where only newly composed and artificial songs were favoured). Then, by another " divine accident," he discovered the tradition of the finest sword-dance from a bedridden old man at Ampleforth in Yorkshire. The few sword-dances still performed in the northern counties were of special interest owing to the sacri- ficial rites, the inner meaning of which has been forgotten, though it connects them with the almost universal mythology of " The Golden Bough," traced through the ages by Sir James Frazer.
Originally, as in the ancient Roman rite of " the priest who slew the slayer and will himself be slain," beside the Lake of Nemi, the victim, representing worn-out old age or the Old
*Cecil Sharp. By A. H. Fox Strangways, in collaboration with
Maud Karpele.s. (Oxford University Press. 7s. 6d.)
Year, was actually killed in the midst of the circular dance. Then a bullock or a stag was substituted, and then a man with an animal's head, and finally a man who was revived by a burlesque doctor. The present survival of the pagan rite is thus described by Mr. Fox Strangways : " The climax of the dance is invariably brought about by the plaiting of tho swords into a star of five, six, or eight points, accor- ding to the number of dancers. The plaited swords are then held aloft by the leader, and afterwards pladed, as a rule, round the neck of one of the dancers or of an (.9re. character ; at a word from the leader each dancer releases his sword by drawing it towards him, whereupon the victim suffers a mimic decapitation and, falling down, feigns death, from which he is afterwards miraculously brought to life."
This " knot" of plaited swords has now become the symbol of the Folk Dance and Song Society.
One of Cecil Sharp's great services to the folk-dance wr,-; his long.and laborious task of deciphering the various editions. of John Playford's Dancing Master, which ran through 17 editions between 1650 and 1728. Playford collected a large number of country dances practised in his time and for at least a century earlier. Besides the traditional dances Sharp collected in the country, he made his selection from Playford a standard for the dances we now follow. He was himself a most inspiring leader in the dance, and I have known a dullish set of dancers suddenly spring into life when he came to the piano and played the tune. His settings to the traditional songs are sometimes extraordinarily fine ; I should choose " The Cuckoo," " The Water is Wide," and particularly " Herod and the Cock " and " The Sprig of Thyme." All playgoers will remember his collaboration with Mr. Granville Barker in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
As was natural, Cecil Sharp met with strong opposition from musicians who thought him a pedant for insisting on the value of the true folk-music, and from philanthropists who regarded the dances as merely enjoyable recreation for their boys and girls ; also from the Board of Education who could draw no distinction between dated, composed, and printed songs like " Tom Bowling and the real traditional songs like " The Golden Vanity " or " The Seeds of Love." The controversy was bitter, but Cecil Sharp never moved from his principle that the folk-song has grown and not been made, and one may hope that there is now no danger of a general mix-up of the two kinds of song or dance. The point was gained, but the opposition almost drove Cecil Sharp to exile in America.
He was always much attracted to America, partly to collect songs lingering there, but partly to encourage the dances of the English tradition. I thought this could not succeed, but was surprised a year or two ago to find myself dancing the familiar figures with forty or fifty New Yorkers, instructed by one of the London Headquarters Staff. The collection of songs was, however, far more important, and Cecil Sharp's journeys for three summers among the Southern Appalachian mountains was the greatest actual adventure of his life. Miss Karpeles in two separate chapters has written the account of this adventure marked by severe hardships, difficulties of mountain roads and primitive food, but also by a knowledge of life among the strange and almost unknown inhabitants whose customs and language have hardly changed since they first came over from the northern and border counties of England more than two centuries ago. The research of the two explorers was successful beyond hope, and so we must take leave of a man whose chief power lay in persistent con- centration and a readiness to perceive true value in what others disregarded as common and uncultured.
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