The Architecture of Kinship: Race, Folk Revivalism, and Cecil J. Sharp

The work of the most prominent collector of English folk song and dance, Cecil J. Sharp, was fundamentally shaped by racial ideology. Tracing the development of Sharp’s ideas from late Victorian evolutionary thinking to his explicitly racist comments about African Americans during his fieldwork in Southern Appalachia, I demonstrate that race was the organizing principle of his understanding of heritage and national identity. Race determined his pursuit of tradition and cultural rejuvenation: songs and dances were sought out as signifiers of patrimony and put to work as means of revitalizing an identity that increasingly appeared to be under threat from foreign immigration, cosmopolitanism, mass culture, and miscegenation. Sharp was intent on conserving forms of cultural expression that he believed to be markers of race, employing these to articulate and disseminate a restrictive, segregated idea of the nation grounded in ancestry and blood inheritance. By reconstructing the racial logic that informed Sharp’s collecting and revivalism, the article shows that recovery of vernacular culture was inseparable from projects of exclusion and national regeneration. More broadly, it argues that folk revivalism is never politically innocent: even as fieldwork illuminates marginalized traditions, it can also sustain myths of racial belonging and cultural purity.