**Simon Robson (Cecil SHarp) & Mariam Haque (Louie Hooper)** Photo by Robert Day

‘Young women they swim like ducks in the water.
Young women they swim like ducks in the water.
If I were a young man I soon would swim after.’
‘Hares on the Mountain’ (collected from Louie Hooper)

I recently attended a performance of ‘Folk’ at the Hampstead Theatre, London (until 6 August). This fine play, written by Nell Leyshon, explores the ethical issues around the collection of folk songs in England in the early twentieth century.

Louie: They’re my mother’s songs. They ain’t your songs.
Sharp: They’re folk songs. They belong to all of us.

Leyshon focuses the drama on a series of encounters between composer Cecil Sharp and impoverished glove-maker Louie Hooper. Sharp, who runs a music school in London, visits Louie’s Somerset village of Hambridge in search of folk songs. He is on a mission to preserve traditional English music, which he fears will be lost forever as industrialisation sweeps away agrarian culture.

Sharp: People learn them while they work in the fields. But now the machines are taking over… They’ll plough the fields and harvest the corn. And once they take over, there won’t be any singing. These fields will fall silent.

Sharp also seeks to challenge the belief, widely held in academic circles, that England has never had a music of its own. It is known on the continent as ‘das land ohne musik’ - the land without music.

Sharp: I’ll prove we have our own music and one day people will see that I saved them.

Louie has found temporary work at the vicarage where Sharp is staying. When he hears one of the many melodies she has learned from her mother, he is hugely impressed.

Sharp: That song… You can’t imagine, but I didn’t even know it existed. And not just me. Nobody knew it existed.

Sharp believes Louie will be a particularly valuable source in his endeavour.

Sharp: The thing about you, Louie, is that you don’t know what it is that you know.

In his conversations with Louie, Sharp makes observations on the genesis of folk songs. Since they are orally transmitted and remembered by heart, they tend to comprise short verses and simple choruses. They also develop and change as they are passed from one singer to another.

After his first meeting with Louie, Sharp has to return to London, but he resolves to return for more material.

Sharp: I have to come back and completely empty you out of songs. I shall hold you upside down and shake you till every song has fallen out.

‘Said I: Pretty maid, shall I go with you
In the meadows to gather some may?
She answered: O no, sir, my pathway is here.
Any other would lead me astray.’
‘As I Walked Through the Meadows’ (collected from Louie Hooper)

When Sharp arrives back in Hambridge, he presents Louie with a signed copy of his first compendium of traditional ballads, including those that he has collected from her: ‘Folk Songs from Somerset by Cecil J Sharp.’

Sharp: I’ve signed this one for you. For Louie Hooper. ‘Exchange is no robbery.’ It is a fair exchange, isn’t it, Louie? Your songs for this book.

At this point Louie becomes uncomfortable with Sharp’s enterprise. His publication doesn’t give due credit or recompense. It fixes a particular version of each song, denying it further interpretation or evolution.

Louie: In my world the songs change. When different singers do them. Each of us have our own song. Now you’ve done that, they can’t change. Now you’ve pinned them down so tight there’s no room for them to breathe. They’ll always be what you’ve written down.

Worse still, in transcribing the folk songs for a broad base of pianists and singers, Sharp has stripped them of their beats and trills. He has in effect ‘tidied’ them up.

Louie: But that ain’t what I sung to you. It didn’t sound like that.
Sharp: Look, you have to understand that I had to make it so that anyone could play it. And sing it.

As an audience we get to compare the wonderful mournful complexity of the originals with Sharp’s rather ponderous versions. Louie has a point.

Louie: You only see what you want to see. You make everything too simple.

There’s a lesson here for anyone working in the business of marketing and communication. We too deal in distillation and reduction. We must be careful that, in the process of definition, we do not deny brands the opportunity to modulate and mutate; and that, in removing the extraneous and unnecessary, we do not also lose nuance and texture, beats and trills. We should seek simple, not simplistic, solutions.

There’s no doubt that Sharp did us all a service in preserving a musical heritage that would otherwise have been lost. But he was an arrogant and prejudiced man, and his endeavour came at a price. As Louie points out, he had no right to speak for England.

Louie: You come here thinking you know what England is. You don’t. It’s all more complicated and more changing and more strange than you reckon.

‘Oh where have you been, Rendal, my son?
Oh where have you been, my sweet pretty one?
I’ve been to my sweetheart! Oh make my bed soon,
I’m sick to my heart, and fain would lay down.’
‘Lord Rendal’ (collected from Louie Hooper)

No. 379