>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. [ Silence ] >> So, just to let you know a little bit about the series, the Homegrown Series was created to showcase the best of traditional music and dance from around the country. And as you may know we also have a lecture series called the Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series and in fact we have a lecture in that series tomorrow with Fiona Ritchie from the Thistle and Shamrock. So come back for that if you're interested. But the reason for mentioning that is that for years I have been talking with Brian Peters, one of our performers tonight, about the idea of doing one of his ballad presentations here. But it didn't quite fit with our usual Botkin audience. And our Homegrown concerts specifically are about music from around the United States. So it didn't really fit in that series either. So we kept the idea in mind and over the years things changed. And one thing that changed was that Brian started to do this great show focused not just on ballads but on Cecil Sharp's collecting in the Appalachians. And this made the bridge between his English material and our American material just much clearer. And beyond that he started to the show with a really fine old time musician named Jeff Davis. And Jeff in addition to just being a great guy and a great musician is a protege of both Frank Warner and Mike Seeger, two major collection donors for the center. So all of a sudden there were lots of connections with our collections and so this year seemed like a great opportunity to do it. And the final thing that helped make it possible especially as an evening concert here was an offer to co-sponsor by the Folklore Society of greater Washington, also as FSGW. So to briefly switch hats I'm also a board member of FSGW which is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to presenting and promoting folk music, folk song, folk dance, storytelling and other folk arts in the Washington, DC area. So you can find more information about FSGW and the American Folklife Center out at the table that's just outside. And that's also where you'll find recordings by the musicians tonight whom you can, which you can purchase out there at the break. So we're coming up on some important anniversaries. This year actually marks the 50th anniversary of FSGW. And 2016 is the 40th anniversary of the American Folklife Center. And more importantly 2016 is also the 100th anniversary of Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles first trip to the Appalachians. And we don't need to say much more about that because Brian and Jeff are going to tell us all about that. But we should mention that AFC has a really interesting collection made by Maud Karpeles with Sidney Robertson Cowell in 1950 when they went back to the Appalachians and visited some of the same communities and tried to find some of the same singers that Sharp and Karpeles had collected years before. So we do have some direct collection connections to the Sharp collection as well. So there's a couple of more little details I want to mention. One if that the Library has asked us to conduct an audience survey. And so there's survey forms out on the table out there at the break. If you could fill one of those out that would be wonderful. A second thing is that the artists have asked me to mention that they're going to back in the U.S. in October and touring together I should say in October doing a different show. And FSGW will be involved in that. So if you stay in touch with FSGW you can find out more about their upcoming concert. And so apart from that without further ado I'm going to introduce the performers. Brian Peters is one of the leading solo performers of English traditional songs and music and he frequently tours in the United States. And he's been teaching at a lot of the sort of Appalachian heritage centers including the Augusta Heritage Center and Swannanoa Gathering teaching some of these connections between English song and American song. And Jeff Davis as I mentioned had worked with Frank Warner and with Mike Seeger and with a lot of great musicians. But just apart from that he's a wonderful old time musician and a terrific guy as well. And so he's a banjo player, a fiddler and singer. And we really are happy to have him here tonight as well. And so please welcome both of them, Brian Peters and Jeff Davis. [ audience applause ] >> Well that ladies and gentlemen is how to give an introduction, absolutely professional, world class. Well sing a song with us for starters. [ singing ] Good singing, thanks [inaudible]. [ audience applause ] >> So that was a ballad from what has been described by a reliable sources one of the great folk song collections of all time. I thought you'd be more excited by that piece of news. One of the greatest folk song collections of all time. And that collection as Steve has explained to you was made almost 100 years ago. It began 99 years ago almost to the week. And it concerned a fellow who was at the time considered the foremost expert on English folk song and also on English folk dance. And his name was Cecil Sharp. We saw him just now in that sequence of photographs which incidentally were all taken by Cecil Sharp himself except for the one where he appeared in the white hat with the lady with bonnet. You saw that one. >> Selfies not having been invented yet. Somebody else took that one. >> So Cecil Sharp as we shall see made three visits to the Appalachian Mountains. He went looking to British ballads that had been taken out there by immigrants across the ocean and which had survived in surprisingly good health in some of those remote mountain communities for 100, 150 years. So this is the story of that quest. >> It's, I think people think that these old songs largely came out of absolutely nowhere but it's nice to remember that Cecil Sharp wrote that down on August 24, 1917 outside Manchester, Kentucky which was a deprived old town. And he'd noted in his diaries about its lawlessness and the difficulties of the town and the gun play. And being a somewhat polished English music teacher from England he was not exactly feeling entirely comfortable in all these places. And we'll talk much about that. A quite difficult time he had finding the old songs, of which he did such a good job. The song, Green Willow Tree, came not just from anywhere on that August day but from Polly Patrick [assumed spelling]. And she was 45 year old widow and Sharp had struck up a very close friendship to Polly Patrick which he described that they said that they had vivacious talks. And she wrote to Sharp months later, she said it would do my heart good to see you. And here they are enjoying a smoke together which I think was not the only time that happened. We are going to have a lot of readings from Sharp's diaries and the perfect person to do that of course is Brian Peters with his polished received English accent. So please welcome Cecil Sharp. >> She has been married three times but was born Patrick and still is Patrick. Her first husband Hobbs was a good sort in his way she said, but killed a man and had to go to the penitentiary. So she took up with one Baines who was a rotter and whom she sent about his business in three months. The third one, Burns, was better but a slacker and wouldn't work. So she kicked him out and for the third time paid $2 to get back her old name of Patrick. As it costs $2 a piece to alter the names of the children that they remain with their father's names. She's a very nice and capable person with a fund a racy expressions which delight me. Talking of England she said she would like to go there if it weren't for that big river [inaudible]. >> Well the Green Willow Tree that she sang so nicely is exactly the kind of song that Sharp came to America to find. The title of his book that came out as a result of his travels was English Folk Songs in the Southern Appalachians. And you're going to hear a lot more than just that tonight. But after about a score of years collecting songs in the south of England he found himself somewhat difficult financial straits and was going off to America to be advisor in various productions in particular a production of Midsummer Night's Dream in New York City. And he's also giving lectures on English song and dance around the country. But he was laid up in Lincoln, Massachusetts and a woman named Olive Dame Campbell had been in the south with her husband who's a missionary teacher and had uncovered lots of songs. She didn't go there looking for songs but discovered there's all kinds of music down there. And she was not a trained musician but she wrote them down as best she could. And she went all the way to Lincoln, Massachusetts and presented Sharp with her [inaudible] of songs. And she'd written down 200 songs. Well Sharp was impressed. He hadn't realized that there was such a wealth of material in America or wealth of very, very old stuff. >> So after this meeting Sharp decided on this single minded quest to find these old British ballads that were still nestling there in the mountains. And it was a quest as we will see that had all kinds of problems with the health and the traveling and terrain and the weather. But nonetheless they stuck at it. So the Green Willow Tree that you just heard was a version of an old British ballad called the Golden Vanity that goes back to the 1680s and the earliest version we have of that ballad mentioned Sir Walter Raleigh who was one of Queen Elizabeth's first courtiers. But not all the songs that Cecil Sharp found had got that kind of pedigree back in the old world. His collection as we found when we began to explore it includes quite a lot of songs that were clearly formed in America and several that were equally clearly of African American origin. So we're going to sing you a version of the Gospel Plow that Cecil Sharp found. He recorded it. He's heard sung by school children in Eastern Kentucky. We would love to believe that these were the school children. This is definitely one of Sharp's photographs of school children but we can't tell you for certain that these were the very ones. >> Well I think you will recognize this song from any number of sources. But this is the way Sharp heard it, it's the way he wrote it down. We added the banjo part based on banjo style of an old banjo player by the name of Dock Boggs, one of my favorite players. [ music ] [ audience applause ] Well Sharp arrived in the southern mountains in July of 1916 and commenting on the spectacular overwhelming sites that he saw and the extraordinary difficult journeys. He wrote about it often in his diaries. On about the 25th of June, 1916 he wrote this. >> Despite the heat, the dust, the lack of food, the swarms of flies, hay fever, asthma, etc. it was a wonderful trip. The ride from Knoxville here would be difficult to beat in any part of the world I imagine, the usual line from New York via Salisbury and not from Knoxville here direct are washed away. The 125 miles from Murphy to this 8 and 1/2 hours. We have never less than two and sometimes three engines to haul us along. This may not be the actual locomotive but I do like American steam locomotives. >> Well it's also completely irrelevant to the program but Brian has a slide in every, of a train in every show he does, so. Well so that's the, may be the train they were on. Here's a picture of Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles at Berea, Kentucky railroad station. And that's actually them. Well Maud Karpeles as Steve mentioned was a remarkable woman herself and will be much featured in this program. She was his assistant and faithful companion through all three trips that they made to the mountains. And it is easy to say that without her the trips would not have been possible. She was a former social worker from deep inner London and she started a dance of, a Morris dance team in east end. And developed an interest in folk songs and got involved with the English Folk Dancing Song Society which is where she met Sharp. And she accompanied not only on the trips to Appalachia but to several of the earlier trips that he made for teaching and places like Maine. >> So here they are giving a demonstration of Morris dance up in Maine. At this point Maud Karpeles was 31 years old and Cecil Sharp was 57 which made him too old to serve in the First World War. At the very moment he was out here doing his song collecting several of his younger colleagues were being cut down at the Battle of the Somme which upset him dreadfully. So we're going to look now at where exactly they went. This is for the benefit of English audiences who have no clue really where the Appalachians are but kind of know basically that people play banjos there. >> Brian grew up thinking that in America that the places in America must be relatively close to where they actually were in England. So that New Hampshire must be. Yeah, another, another bad education system. Well so what you have here is the, the brown parts are the Appalachian chain and the red states are the four states where they visited which I don't think I need to tell you what those are. But they concentrated in the central part. And to absolute magic an hour will appear on the [inaudible]. >> Sorry, yes. >> Yes. So they headed up in, see it was actually July 27, 1916 they headed up into the hills and mountains around Madison County. And they lodged with a missionary, Mrs. Edith Fish [assumed spelling] that they described as a grim old maid. Sharp said. >> Breakfast at 7:00 and we started across the mountains to [inaudible] one of the most frightening experiences I have ever gone through. There was not a vestige of real road until we got to Marshall, nothing but deep mud. Sometimes nearly up to the axles with huge and boulders. I should not have believed wheels and horses could get over such tracks unless I had seen the thing done. >> He often traveled in what was called a jolt wagon for some reason. Well Miss Fish did take them to meet local singers. And they met Granny Banks who did sing several great songs for Sharp. But she was a bit reluctant because she was a, she had taken up religion and was reluctant to sing the old love songs as they called them. And this was often a problem that they ran into. On day four of their trip they met Mary Sands. And Mary Sands was what Sharp described as a prize folk singer and sang several versions of wonderful little ballads that you have heard, Silk Merchant's Daughter, Golden Glove, Polly Oliver, the Outlandish Knight. Sharp went looking for old English songs and he often described meeting people in the mountains who seemed very English to him. But Mary Sands was not. She was English, descended from the Sheltons who were early arrivals in the area. But her great grandmother was Cherokee and he name was Glunda Clitch [assumed spelling]. Mary Sands descendants who may know, Sheila Kay Adams and Joe Penland are still singing the songs, Mary Sands descendants. >> Sheila Kay Adams said to me last week that she detects a family resemblance between herself and Mary Sands. >> Another important family were the Hensley's of Carmen, North Carolina. One day Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles walked six miles down a very rough track, a wet though troublesome pretty path. >> This may not be the precise wet and troublesome. [ audience laughter ] >> Sharp said. >> Found Mrs. Hensley and her daughter Emma [inaudible]. The lot are very pretty, looked full grown but was only 13. Made great friends and got them both singing. Dined with them and after dinner Rubin Hensley who was the husband and father turned up and played his fiddle. So we're going to sing you an old English ballad that's been passed into the repertoire with Mrs. Rosie Hensley. One of many of our old ballads about young women who have to dress up as a man in military uniform in order to pursue her lover across the sea after he has been thrust into forces. There's a song called William Taylor, some of your American versions of this song have an interesting line where the young woman's sailors uniform on which she has disguised herself on the ship suffers what you over call a wardrobe malfunction. But we don't like to excite our audiences too much so Rosie Hensley's version did not include that detail. But nonetheless includes a really great moral to the tail which particularly seems to appeal to some of the female members of our audiences. [ Music ] [ audience applause ] >> Well Cecil and Maud got on particularly well with the Hensley's and their daughter. Spent several days though. Sharp wrote. >> Maud and I dined [inaudible] and the rest of the time sat on the veranda while the three sang and played and talked mainly about the songs. I must have taken down 30 tunes from them and have not yet exhausted them. >> The Hensley's were very enthusiastic about sending daughter Emma off to school. And Sharp sent the school fees that were had to be paid and money to have the uniforms made. And Emma was enrolled. Just a couple of days later Maud Karpeles and Cecil Sharp went down to a ferry and who was there but Emma who having run away from school. But Sharp wasn't angry. He wrote that he suspected that a Presbyterian education would probably have stifled her singing. And that, he said it was better that she kept her liberty. Unfortunately all of Sharp's photographs in the visits to the Henley's have been lost. We hope they turn up someday but they haven't yet. Here's a picture of Emma years later when as Steve mentioned Maud Karpeles went back in 1950. He located quite a few of the singers that were still alive, Emma being one of them. And there she is looking quite happy I must say. Sharp often talked in great length with the patriarch of the family about current affairs, world events. >> Found him on his back with bare feet in the veranda reading. Got me to explain the significance of the Dardanelles and questioned me about the pyramids and the Panama Locks. But whatever we did there was singing and fiddling all the time. And I got some very interesting stuff. They always tune my fiddles in this fake way when they play Kentucky tunes. >> Fake way is an open tuning, open fiddle tuning which I'm not going to do so I don't have to constantly retune fiddle tonight. But this is a old tune called Johnson Boys which you've probably all heard. But the first way through is pretty much the way that Cecil Sharp noted this down. [ Music ] [ Audience applause ] >> Sharp had all, some very fixed and preset ideas about the mountain people and wrote about them. I should say that they are just exactly what the English peasant was 100 or more years ago. They speak English, look English and their manners are old fashion English. Heaps of words and expressions they use habitually in ordinary conversation and obsolete. They own their own land and have done so for three or four generations. They have their American quality that are freer than the English peasants. I find them very easy to get on with and have no difficulty in making them sing and show their enthusiasm for the songs. They have been so isolated and protected from outside influence that their own music and song have not only been uncorrupted but also uninfluenced by art, music in any way. This is clear enough in the character of the tunes I have collected which are in a more archaic form than that in which they are now being sung in England. >> Now some of this was a highly romantic notion of what he was observing. Sharp's singers were Scotch-Irish descended from Ulster Presbyterian so it immigrated after 1710 to the east coast and south and west into Appalachia. They were descended from lowland Scotch and northern English and settled in Ulster [inaudible] British government, all very complicated history. Then of course there was a later wave of Irish and from in the famine. And some of them, some of the mountain people were Germans who brought into Quaker, Pennsylvania and then moved south and west to a lot of African Americans, Native Americans, all interacted with one another and Sharp came to realize this. So our next ballad is one known in England, very old and quite rare in the U.S., battle of wits between a young child and the devil. And it's from Mrs. Coates of Flag Pond, Tennessee. >> A weary stony walk up to the top of Higgins Creek. We called on Mr. and Mrs. Coates from whom I got a fine ballad, The False Night. Altogether a very successful if fatiguing day. We must have walked 14 miles over very bad tracks. We got back thoroughly tired out at 6:30 p.m. nearly 12 hours since we left in the morning. So I'm going to sing you the False Night on the Road. [ Music ] [ Audience applause ] >> Well a beautiful ancient song. Well this next slide shows Sharp's notebook. >> That very song. >> That very song, there it is taken down that day from Mrs. Coates. So he wrote down the melodies, Maud Karpeles wrote down the words in long or short hand depending about what she was doing at the time. And Sharp noted down the music. And here is a music book page. >> Oops, sorry, you missed it, sorry, if you weren't paying attention it's too bad. >> I wasn't. Well anyway it was a famous picture of Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles at work. Now some of the visits that they made here highly successful, 30 songs in a couple of days, 20 songs in a single day, few 10s of songs from a single singer. And when you're reading the diaries it has been said of some of Sharp's notations, his diary notes, that when he said things like she's a small mind to be worked or when I have caught him and emptied him suggesting that he was exploiting his singers. We think not. He had a very odd sense of humor and often was making fun of himself. And he often formed very close relationships with people like the Hensley's. Sometimes the quest and people who've done any song collecting notes, sometimes the quest for old songs can be very frustrating. A singer might be forgetful or as we mentioned earlier, with Granny Banks recently converted to a Holy Roller sect and not singing the old songs. And sometimes a day could involve a huge amount of travel, 15 miles of walking over a rough track and searing hit and getting there, the person who promised to be there that day was not. Just wasn't home and nothing to do but move, go on back. But there was one particular who we're fond of hearing about who has, Sharp was very interested, extremely keen to engage. >> I'm now trying to run to the famous singer in this section, William Riley Shelton, usually known as Frizzly Bill all singing Will. Ninth of August, 1916. In the evening wrote many letters to Miss Henrik's [assumed spelling] about arrangements to catch Frizzly Bill for next week. August 15th, Frizzly Bill was to have turned up in the morning but failed to do so. After waiting for him until 11:00 I have up. August 16th, no Frizzly Bill. August 28th, on returning home met Campbell who had found Frizzly Bill and brought him with him, the later staying the night at Mr. Saul Shelton's and promising to sing tomorrow morning for me at 8:00. What will he give me? August 29th, Frizzly Bill came in directly after breakfast and we had a long [inaudible] 12:00 and we adjourned for a recess. As I feared he was practically no use. He's a poor singer and did not know even the words of a single ballad I asked for. Reputations are made here in the mountains as they are elsewhere on small foundations. >> And over a year later oh this still [inaudible]. Sharp wrote on October 5, 1917. >> These things of wide reputation, e.g. Frizzly Bill, rarely have much of value to me. >> Well religion frowned on the old love songs, the ballads and dancing and the fiddle, the instrument of the devil. To get around kids did something called play party games which you've probably heard of. Jean Ritchie [assumed spelling] who you may have heard new a lot of these. Dance like moves accompanied by the kids own singing rather than by an instrument. And so we're going to do a medley of those that Sharp collected. >> Accompanied by Jeff Davis on the spoons. A dazzling spoons break will occur at some point in this medley. What, do you want your spoons [inaudible]. The official spoon player's leg rest has been procured. Here is the cover the cover of a book of kids songs and play party tunes that was published from Sharp's collection. And here is the medley we're going to sing. >> With the singers and the places where they lived. [ Music ] [ Audience Applause ] >> So, thanks, thanks, that medley included snatches of some old British folk songs like that one about I wish, I wish, I wish in vein, I wish I was a maid again was the originally, it was a song about an unwanted pregnancy. And so there was some old, old English folk songs there but obviously some of those songs were American made. So Sharp didn't exclusively look for old English songs. But nonetheless the ones that really excited him were the old ballads, especially those that were rare such as the one Jeff's about to sing you which is Ole Brown which is pretty much extinct in Britain by, by 1916. And here is the man from whom he collected this song. >> Nearly extinct in England but he found six versions of it. Oh actually a dozen versions of this song. The man in the picture here is Philander Fitzgerald who competes for the best name in the collection and the best beard. Brian actually votes for Mr. Coates beard but I think Philander Fitzgerald wins. At any rate Sharp said. >> A wonderful ten mile drive right into the half of the moutains. We sally forth and call on Mr. Philander L. Fitzgerald and his blind wife with whom we spend delightful hours. They live in a very small cabin high on the mountainside. The two were heads of a large family, numbering 120 in all including 10 grandchildren and 65 great grandchildren. When I related to Mr. Alex Coffee [assumed spelling], who was another local singer, what Mr. Fitzgerald had told me about his 120 progeny he answered I dare say that is quite true. And not one of them is of any account. Mr. Philander Fitzgerald is an old confederate soldier. He sang several excellent songs and is a really delightful man 76 years old. >> Well I tried to imagine Sharp's collected almost all things that were unaccompanied. But I tried to imagine a few cases what it might have sounded like if that old singer had played the banjo and had tried to put the old ballads. It happened quite a lot with the old ballads on the banjo. So [inaudible]. [ Music ] [ Audience applause ] >> So I'm shot later presented or sent a woolen jersey to Philander Fitzgerald and Philander's wife got a pair of kid gloves from Maud. And this is one many examples of Sharp being generous to many of the singers he wrote, that he gave generous gratuities to stimulate the memory in several cases. So even Frizzly Bill who we've heard all about got $5 for his trouble. So. >> Five dollars was a lot of money. >> It was, a lot of money in those days. Polly Patrick who we heard the golden vanity sent an appreciative letter to Cecil Sharp which we don't have time to read now because we're kind of rushing towards the interval time. And we're going to try and keep the interval as short as possible because we've got to stuff to kick in. So you do you want to take it from the children's songs. >> So this is a song that Sharp learned from a fellow named Fitzhugh Droan [assumed spelling] who competes for one of the better names in the collection. He actually got, he got quite a few good songs from him but he was a little critical of Droan's attitude, bad attitude. He said he was a mountain boy but now he's only interested in things that contain great thoughts and regards the full songs as something far below his intellectual notice. Well this is a song that he sang. >> I do join in without [inaudible]. >> Yeah, because it's to my wing wong waddle to my jack straw straddle to my John far faddle to my long way home. Got it? Repeat after me. To my wing wong waddle. >> To my wing wong waddle. >> To my jack straw straddle. >> To my jack straw straddle. >> To my John far faddle. >> To my John far faddle. >> To my long way home. >> To my long way home. >> You got it. Here we go. [ Music ] Got a little break. [ Music ] [ Audience applause ] >> Well the man in the picture is Mitchell Wallin in the first of those tunes was the High March. Mitchell Wallin was a brother of. Oh, how did that happen? >> No, no, yeah. >> That's Mitchell Wallin. Half-brother to Mary Sands that we met earlier and one of a small number of fiddlers but nonetheless significant fiddle tunes that Cecil Sharp collection. >> The first one was called High March, not very much a lot of southern tunes. And the second he, Sharp wrote down as Matches Under the Hill. Well on Sharp's last trip to North Carolina he visited Burnsville and the home of Mr. and Mrs. Dellie Hughes [assumed spelling]. >> We had only time to stay half an hour but found her a good singer and a great character. She and her husband lived in a tiny cabin and we're clothed in rags presenting a sorry sight. We promised to be back again next Wednesday in the morning to hear her sing again. She called Maud the pretty little girl. And when I said that would make her conceited and Maud said I was jealous, she said well I like the old boy and it is clear he has [inaudible] in music. So Mrs. Hughes, there she is again on the steps of her cabin, she gave a lively demonstration of a type of song called a jig and she also sung a very famous old British ballad. A version of gypsum dayville [phonetic], The Seven Yellow Gypsies with a particularly fun chorus. [ Music ] [ Audience Applause ] >> We're going to sing a song from the singer in the collection, Sharp's collection, I think we know the most about. And in part that's true because she's the only singer from the collection that had a biography written of her. This is the only performance of this that we've ever done that included the author of the introduction to Betty Smith's book on Jane Gentry who's sitting in the front row, CeeCee Conway. Who by the way has done fabulous work of collecting folk music all around the country. Black banjo players, ballads and all kinds of things. And you should look out for work she's done. CeeCee Conway. But Betty Smith is a singer from Kentucky who got interested in Jane Gentry. And Jane Gentry lived in Hot Springs, North Carolina but she was born [inaudible] she was born in the northwest corner of North Carolina. And a woman named Elizabeth Dottier [assumed spelling] said of her that she was the best ballad singer she ever heard. She was a generation back. She said she was a good singer but there's something pure about Mrs. Gentry's singing, the sweetest most cheerful person always. And a band named Bill Morris's, Bill Morris said that she was the most beautiful singer you've ever heard. Well I am neither the sweetest most cheerful person nor am I the most beautiful thing you've ever heard. But I happen to know to something about the singers from where Mrs. Gentry was from which is Watauga County in the northwest corner of North Carolina. And part of the reason that I went to college in North Carolina was because of the people, those singers in that area. So I don't really know, we have no recordings of Jane Gentry or recordings of her daughter Maud Long but we don't know exactly what Jane sounded like. So anything is speculation. I'm going to sing one of her old songs in the style of more or less of the way it would have been sung way back, a generation before in the northwest corner of North Carolina. And try to take you back to that era [inaudible]. [ Music ] So something like Jane Gentry maybe. [ audience applause ] >> A letter, a very grateful letter that Jane Gentry wrote to Cecil Sharp but we don't have time to read that today. We're going to straight to another of the singers that Sharp visited who's repertoire and who's singing voice were perhaps not of quite the same quality as Jane Gentry's but nonetheless Cecil Sharp was very interested in her and her repertoire. He met this woman Julie Boone in Micaville, North Carolina in 1918. And wrote Mrs. Boone is 49 years old and neighbors call her queer, i.e. crazy. But she has plenty of brain and talks well and intelligently. She's very reserved and rarely talks to anyone except when someone talks to her. She's rarely at home wondering all around the country barefooted and staying wherever she happens to be when it is dark. She was quite ready to sing and evidently enjoyed it. Many of her songs she learned from her father. She evidently had a great deal to do with Negroes [inaudible] in her life for she sings many of their spirituals. >> So Sharp noted down this song from Julie Boone. He called it Swannanoa Town but we think that what she said was Swannanoa Tunnel which was 20 miles from where she lived. So the song is Swannanoa Tunnel and about Swannanoa Tunnel. And it bored through the granite mountainside and took decades to finish. And 300 convicts died in the process of building the tunnel. And the song was probably made by convicts on the chain gang. And so referring to thinking back to so many recordings we're heard of [inaudible] primary, recording chain gangs, we'll sing it something like that style having no idea exactly what Julie Boone would sing it like. But thinking we know what she would have heard. [ Music ] [ Audience applause ] Well we discovered in researching all this that absolutely nothing would keep Cecil Sharp from his work. On the 29th of April, 1917 he was lodged at Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Kentucky an took songs down from students despite a high fever. He wrote. >> Had a terribly bad night coughing continuously from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. Head and [inaudible] still rather bad, the side of my face so sore I cannot touch it and the scalp of my head so tender I cannot brush my silver locks. In the afternoon take down several songs from Mr. Mae Ray and one more from Alice Parsons. So I was curious about the Lincoln Memorial University. I was imagining maybe it was somebody like Oxford or Cambridge University that we have at home. And the students there were the sons and daughters of great privilege. And so I tried to do some research about Lincoln Memorial University and I didn't come up with very much but I did come across this photograph which was taken in 1906. And the caption was from such homes come the students who attend Lincoln Memorial University. Oh, wrong one, sorry, there's the one. So at Lincoln Memorial University Cecil Sharp met a young woman called Mae Ray who sang to him on his sick bed. She was brought in to sing for Cecil Sharp as he lay there on his bed of fever. And she sang an English nursery rhyme that goes back to the time of Queen Elizabeth the first called a Froggy [inaudible]. [ Music ] [ Audience Applause ] >> Well despite Sharp's interest in English songs, he found all kinds of things as you've already heard. Typically they believed that running into African Americans wouldn't produce the kind of music that they were looking for and so they didn't spend a lot of time in black communities. Maud Karpeles diary describes a visit to a settlement where they encountered as they arrived a black man. An so they turned away which is too bad but you should know that just, while you were having such a wonderful time at your break, we just met Maud Karpeles great nephew and great great niece who came to say hello. And so we have to say hello. There they are back there. [ audience applause ] And it's a shame you had to sit in the back row. It's not fair somehow. Oh, there's two seats right here we're told. If you want to come up. Well they did note down a couple songs, two ballads from black singers and Brian's going to sing one of them from Aunt Marie Tomes from Nellysford, Virginia in May of 1918. >> This is Sharp's transcription of Aunt Mariah's version of a Barbara Allen, one of the best known ballads, one of the most popular ballads of all time. And Sharp's account runs after tea we went to see Aunt Maria Tomes. Rather a nice old lady who sang us one good tune. Aunt Maria's aged 85. She was a slave belonging to Mrs. Coleman who freed her after the war and gave her the log cabin in which she now lives which used to be the overseers home. I found her sitting in front of the cabin smoking a pipe. We sang her the Cinnaman which delighted her beyond anything and made her dub me a soldier of Christ, somewhat ironic because Sharp was a live long atheist and socialist and actually couldn't bear religion of any kind. And he particularly despised those infernal Methodists. Anyways, his singing of O Cinnaman, where you gonna run to which he'd already collected during one of his trips to the mountains swayed Aunt Maria who he says sang very beautifully in a wonderfully musical way and with clear and perfect intonation. So of all the version of Barbara Allen I've heard in my time, Aunt Maria's is the first one I ever really felt I wanted to sing. [ Music ] [ Audience Applause ] >> Beautiful version of that. Well [inaudible] frowned on the dancing and frowned on the fiddling and play party songs were one way around it. And then there was what Sharp called jigs, Sharp described solo displays that sounded a lot of like what we call ham boning. And he gives this account of Dellie Hughes, the lady who sang him gypsum [inaudible] performing a jig. >> She stood up, patted, sang and danced. [Inaudible] not the picture of Dellie, never mind, we'll come back to her. All very excitedly and seem to think we should be rather shocked by the exhibition for she asked us to promise not to tell any of our friends in Burnsville that she had sung jigs to us. The words were put in at random at the spur of the moment from a large stock of phrases she had in store. I've heard of jigs before and have gathered that they were frowned upon by some people and I have no doubt that some of the play songs I have taken down were jigs and intended to be danced, sung and patted in the way that Mrs. Hughes performed this one. So this is cue for the photograph. This is another singer who sang jigs to Cecil Sharp and that was Mrs. Eliza Pace of Leslie County Kentucky. And according to Sharp she was a great offender in retailing moonshine and has been sentenced several times. So she sang the following jig which Cecil Sharp believed that these kind of songs were sung as an accompaniment to hoedowns in the absence of a fiddler or banjo picker. We have a banjo picker fortunately. [ music ] Whether we have a fiddler on this side of the stage is [inaudible]. This is called Sugar Babe. [ Music ] [ Audience Applause ] >> Well that's what she sang minus the fiddle and the banjo. Just so you know Sharp absolutely hated American popular music. And let's see, are we going to do, do we have time for this? >> Yes. >> Yeah? Over here? >> No. >> No, okay. >> Oh, yeah, that's where we go, isn't that where we go to next? >> Okay. He absolutely hated American popular music but like the movies. One very unexpected thing to happen to them was when they were in Kentucky in 1918 they were mistaken for German spies. And at a fair meeting some communities have been overtaken by paranoia and people like Sharp and Karpeles came in, different accents, different dress, everything about them. And Sharp actually did hear about a couple being arrested. >> We [inaudible] forth to our old friends Mrs. Townsley and Mrs. Wilson who were ready to hug us with delight if we would have submitted. They had heard that a man and woman had been arrested for spies at Middlesboro and all the neighbors assured them that we were no doubt the criminal couple. Mrs. Wilson nearly came to Middlesboro to see if she could help us. So this Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Townsley were a mother and daughter. Oops, dear me, where are we going, Mrs. Townsley. And they became good friends of Cecil and Maud. According to Sharp they contributed ripping songs and Mrs. Townsley they said, this is one of my favorite of Sharp's pictures. It's just beautifully sharp and has so much character in that woman's face. She was described in Sharp's diary as creole woman, Irish, come French, come Indian. And she sang this old Scottsboro about a character who's very popular in a number of folk songs from the old world. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte. [ Music ] [ Audience Applause ] >> Well thanks. Well needless to say that tune and song weren't performed typically in the mountains on mandocello and constantina [phonetic]. But Brian's [inaudible] best box players so we had to give an opportunity to play. Well the tune that followed the song was a version of Bonaparte's Retreat and it was not collected by Cecil Sharp but by Maud Karpeles when she went back in 1950. And she learned it from the Sugarloaf Sheltons [assumed spelling]. That's you cue Brian. >> Yes, there they are, there they are indeed. >> Sugarloaf Sheltons and we can't absolutely be sure that this is the Sugarloaf Sheltons but we think that they are. >> They are definitely the Sugarloaf Sheltons. But we don't know whether they're related to the many singers called Shelton that Cecil Sharp had met back in 1916. So we've just come up to our final song of the show. So this is one from the, what was their very last trip. And by this time this was the third summer that they've been collecting. It was year 1918 and Cecil and Maud had amassed over 1,600 songs which is a pretty good haul if you're a folk song collector. You're going to be quite pleased with that. So some of those songs are quite familiar. Many of them have lain undisturbed in Sharp and Karpeles book English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians for many, many years. But others are quite well known in the folk revival. Black if the Color, some of you might have heard Christie Moore do that. It's been kind of appropriated by the Irish repertoire these days. But that was collected from Mrs. Lizzie Roberts of Hot Springs in 1916. [Inaudible] town was the template for Bob Dylan's Masters of War and that came from two girls who were at school in Berea, Kentucky who it turned out later we found that they were both called Ritchie and were the elder sisters of Gene Ritchie who you all know about. So this is a song called Jack Went A Sailing which Sharp and Karpeles noted on one of their very last trips which they made to Virginia in August 1918. And it was from a Mrs. Francis Richards whose husband was Ebenezer hence the name Sharp gives her. Then went on half a mile to a Mrs. Ebbie Richards who to our joy proved to be first rate singer, the first we have struck this trip. She sang me a dozen and then it was time to get back. Now Cecil and Maud as usually in the mountains were being put up by missionaries and their hostess really disapproved of Mrs. Richards. He wrote we were told blood curdling stories of the escapades of their farther and near relations, their rascality and low mentality, etc. Oh these missionaries, their whole life seems set upon ignoring the good and nosing out what is objectionably in anybody except themselves of course. So despite all those warnings Cecil and Maud become actually really quite friendly with Mrs. Richards. And when Maud Karpeles came back in 1950 she heard of another collector who had followed in Cecil Sharp's footsteps in 1935. And she wrote this. >> These are Maud's words by the way, people in the back. I heard later that Mr. Winston Wilkinson, a collector of folk songs, that he had called at her house to inquire about songs. She was not there so he explained his mission to her little daughter who offered to fetch her mother from the corn fields. Mrs. Richards came running hot foot to the house. But when she saw Mr. Wilkinson her face fell and almost weeping she exclaimed but it's not Mr. Sharp. Over and over she repeated he said he would come back. So sing this last song from Mrs. Richards. [ Music ] [ Audience Applause ] >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. [ Audience Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.