The Racial Imagination of Cecil J. Sharp, or Kinship and Alterity in English Folk Revivalism

The work of the most prominent 20th-century collector of English folk song and dance, Cecil J. Sharp, was driven by racial ideology. This article explores the development of Sharp’s idea of race as it emerges from evolutionary thinking as well as his explicitly racist views of Black people evident from his fieldwork in Southern Appalachia. Race is the underlying reality in Sharp’s worldview, one that determined his pursuit of heritage 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 inherited traditions that he understood to be markers of race, employing these to articulate and disseminate a restrictive, segregated idea of the nation. Folk song and dance, for Sharp, were vessels of belonging that in conveying elements of the deep past into the present looked toward a triumphant, palingenetic future in which this racial inheritance might finally bear fruit. His collecting offers a powerful reminder that folk revivalism is never innocent and that even as fieldwork illuminates the cultural margins it can underwrite the sophistry of myth.