CHAPTER 9 | ANGLO-CELTIC BALLADS AND THEIR COLLECTORS 217
K English folk song
collector Cecil Sharp (1859–
1924) paid several visits
to America, transcribing
songs from residents of
Appalachia. Here, Sharp
and his assistant Maud
Karpeles (at right) collect
from Mrs. Doc Pratt of
Knott County, Kentucky,
in 1917.nostalgia for a precommercial era—were sounded often by collectors in Britain
and the United States. Indeed, these themes still echo in present-day notions,
often unconscious, about authenticity and commercialism in music, as later
chapters will explore.
In the early 1900s Sharp began to study the oral tradition that still existed in
England and Scotland. His way of collecting a song was standard for his time:
singers were asked to repeat what they had sung until Sharp had transcribed
the melody accurately and written down a complete version of the text. Ballad
scholars, with their background in literary criticism, were slow to adopt the
Edison recording machines already in use by ethnomusicologists, and Sharp,
although interested in ballad music as well as words, shared their bias against
sound recording. In 1907 he published English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions, based
on his own collection and analysis of some 1,500 examples. Sharp’s study con-
cludes that folk melody is based on the old medieval modes rather than major or
minor scales and that folk songs were composed by individuals, then transmit-
ted by a communal process.
Of the English and Scottish singers Sharp had encountered, only those
over the age of seventy still remembered any of the old ballads, leading him
to the conclusion that ballad singing would soon be a dead art form. That
changed in 1915, though, when Sharp learned from Olive Dame Campbell,
a Massachusetts native living in Appalachia, that a community maintaining
an ancient folk song tradition existed in the mountains of North Carolina.
Campbell, while studying the culture of the rural southern highlands with
her husband, John C. Campbell, as part of a project to improve schools in the
region, had noticed that some of the songs she heard there, sung by young
and old alike, were versions of the Child ballads. The following year Sharp
launched a collecting expedition in the western part of the state. The fruits of
that trip appeared in Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians (1917), a joint pub-
lication with Olive Campbell and the fi rst major collection of the mountain
people’s music.
Counting both England and America, Sharp collected no fewer than
twenty-eight versions of “The Gypsy Laddie.” On September 1, 1916, in Flag
Pond, Tennessee, he notated a version in seven stanzas with an added refrain.
Here the emphasis is on the conversation between husband and
wife when he catches up with her. No revenge is taken; no gyp-
sies are hung. The wife refuses to return home and then, in the
last two stanzas, regrets her decision. The next day, in Rock Fork,
Tennessee, Sharp heard a fi ve-stanza version whose melody is
quite different, drawing out the fi rst and third lines and repeat-
ing the fourth line of each stanza. The wife has left behind a
child as well as home and husband. And the husband returns
home alone, after repossessing her expensive shoes.
In no version of “The Gypsy Laddie” are listeners told why
the lady might want to leave, nor does either of these examples
describe her departure. Instead, husband and wife are plunged
immediately into the consequences of her leaving. Characters
speak in plain, formulaic language, with standard epithets, such
as the “milk-white” horse the squire rides in both versions and the
lady’s “lily-white hand” in the second.172028_09_205-230_r3_ko.indd 217 23/01/13 11:29 AM