Cecil James Sharp, a 40-year-old music teacher from London, was gazing out across the snow-covered drive at his mother-in-law's cottage in Headington, Oxfordshire when he saw a bizarre sight. Eight men dressed all in white, their shirts decorated with ribbons and bells strapped to their shins, were lining up in front of the house. A concertina player struck up a tune and the men leapt into the air to perform a dance – Laudanum Bunches.
A mesmerised Sharp rushed to investigate and the dancers apologised, explaining that it was customary for them to dance only at Whitsuntide but, as times were hard, they thought they'd try to make a few extra coppers over Christmas. But Sharp, who'd seen nothing like it before, had eyes and ears only for their dances, firing questions at them, asking to see more.
The profound long-term consequences of this strange, chance meeting between Cecil Sharp and the Headington Quarry Morris Men have resonated through English folk ever since. It triggered in Sharp a passion for folklore which, with dogged dedication, he was to pursue and champion for the rest of his life; a life that saw him hailed as the founding father – or perhaps more accurately, godfather – of modern folk music.
He meticulously notated the five dances Headington Quarry performed for him on that Boxing Day morning and became lifelong friends with the side's concertina player William Kimber. His subsequent bicycle journeys through the English countryside painstakingly gathering songs, tunes and dances in his notebook have long become the stuff of folk legend.
The imposing old building at the leafier end of Camden in north London that bears Sharp's name and is the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society is its own testament to the genre's most dominant figure. For more than a century, Sharp has remained a towering, pervasive yet still somewhat contentious presence.
Would we even have heard half the folk songs now in common currency were it not for his tireless research, or his books and lectures? Would the folk movement have existed at all had Sharp not founded the English Folk Dance Society in 1911?
Such questions have been hotly debated ever since. Various books, essays and theses have questioned Sharp's practices, accusing him of creating a narrow-minded and falsely sanitised impression of rural England by omitting any material that offended his sensibilities, while failing to elicit enough information about the source of the songs donated to him.
There seems little doubt that Sharp was a highly selective collector, but equally the material he assembled – the official figure is 4,977 different tunes – provides the solid backbone of the traditional music heard today. The folk music world would indisputably be a much sorrier, sparser place without it.
Sharp's second epiphany famously occurred four and a half years after his encounter with the Headington Quarry Morris Men when he was visiting his friend Charles Marson, the vicar in the Somerset village of Hambridge. It was there he overheard the gardener John England singing The Seeds of Love – one of the most beautiful songs in the folk canon – firing his inexhaustible quest through the West Country to unearth more of the same. Single-minded, determined and relentless, Sharp's searches produced remarkably rich pickings: whatever Sharp's faults, he clearly forged an empathic relationship with the singers he found in village communities, overcoming their suspicions and persuading them to share their old songs with him.
His missionary zeal also took him on several self-financed trips to the US, where he found another rich harvest of English songs imported by settlers.
One can only conjecture about the discomfort and indignity that Sharp, an asthmatic vegan, suffered in his quest, tramping up muddy tracks in the Appalachian mountains, where one community tried to convince him chicken was a vegetable.
He wasn't the only collector around but, at the very time he was traipsing through the Appalachians, other prominent characters in the field, such as composer George Butterworth, were being killed in the first world war and Sharp emerged as the pre-eminent and most prolific collector of his day.
Sharp's autocratic control of the early folk revival and his heavy-handed treatment, in particular, of his first collaborator and former friend Mary Neal still inspire lively debate.
A Sister of Mercy, social worker and suffragette, Neal formed the Espérance Club with a group of sewing girls she had rescued from London slums. But Sharp berated Neal over the perceived inaccuracies of their "hoydenish", boisterous dancing, while she in turn accused him of pedantry. It was a bitter fall-out and Neal was effectively written out of folk revival history, while – for a time at least – Sharp was untouchable.
