For various reasons I was not willing to wait and so the article was submitted to Musical Traditions. It was accepted, but only on the understanding that it would be some years before space could be found in this annual publication. Instead, some eighteen months ago, I decided to submit the article to the Folk Music Journal for possible publication. At one time it had seemed that the article would form the foreword to a book of Cecil Sharp's Appalachian photographs, but this was not to be. I also consulted contemporary newspaper accounts, such as there were, which documented Sharp's lecture tours outside the mountains.Ībout 15 years ago I put all this material together in the first draft of Cecil Sharp in America, an article which eventually disappeared, unpublished, into the depths of my filing cabinet. In a few instances I managed to trace people who remembered Sharp visiting their parents or other elderly relatives to collect songs. from other people who knew Sharp or who had accompanied him during this period of his life. Clearly, in order to gain a less one-sided view, it would have been better to also have had access to other contemporary records, i.e. Sharp had been accompanied by Maud Karpeles, his secretary, and I found that her diaries were also available for study. A number of people, including Douglas Kennedy who had known Sharp in the early 1920s, were offended by my remarks and, realising that my knowledge of Sharp was, at best, secondhand, I decided to seek out Sharp's original diaries and extant correspondence, so that I could let Sharp himself tell me what had happened during his Appalachian forays. In the article I made one or two mildly critical comments about Cecil Sharp, the English folksong collector who had made a remarkable collection of songs in the mountains during the period 1916-1918. ![]() The following year I wrote a short article about the singer/banjo-player Dan Tate, which was published in the Folk Music Journal. I first visited the Appalachian Mountains in the summer of 1979. Article MT047 Cecil Sharp in America collecting in the Appalachians
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