Devon by Dog Cart and Bicycle: The Folk Song Collaboration of Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp, 1904-17 (Part I)
2008; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2056-6166
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Humanities and Scholarship
ResumoThe name of Cecil Sharp and his position as a collector of and advocate for folk song is well known to a large section of the public, and the centenary of his first folk song collecting was marked by a number of events and publications in August 2003. That of Sabine Baring-Gould is, generally, less familiar, at least as a collector of folk songs, although many people might know of him as the author of the hymn 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' or through his other work as novelist, antiquarian, hagiographer, and travel writer. Sharp was twenty-five years younger than Baring-Gould and began his song collecting fifteen years after Baring-Gould had started the main phase of his own work. Sharp initially sought out Baring-Gould for advice, and this led to a close collaborative relationship between 1904 and 1907. The two men met a number of times and, it is clear, had a respect for one another which was maintained, through visits and through correspondence, over several further years. Working together, they established many of the working practices for the song collectors who followed them, and had a profound influence on folk song collecting in England during the first half of the twentieth century. Their collaboration has not previously been studied in any detail, and this article seeks to explore and explain their relationship, making use of letters and papers from their manuscripts as well as other published and unpublished sources. ********** 'Mr. Cecil Sharpe [sic] said it was through Mr. Baring-Gould that he first came into folk song. He had found, as a school master, that folk song was the only music he could teach the raw boy, and he first used the songs discovered by Mr. Baring-Gould, and then began to collect for himself. (1) Sabine Baring-Gould It will be, perhaps, as well to give a brief sketch of the life of Sabine Baring-Gould (Figure 1). To begin with, it would be useful to deal with the pronunciation of his first name. Members of the family confirm that it is pronounced 'Say-bin', and that he was named after his uncle, Sir Edward Sabine, the Arctic explorer. Sabine Baring-Gould was born in Exeter on 24 January 1834, the first child of Captain Edward Baring-Gould, who had retired from the army of the East India Company after an accident. Captain Baring-Gould could not settle to the life of a country gentleman and took his family travelling around Europe for most of the years until Sabine was seventeen. As a result, his education was picked up from a ragtag assortment of schools and tutors. This turned out better than might have been expected, for he developed a talent for languages and a natural curiosity that was to lead him down many unexpected paths. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] His interest in archaeology was sparked at the age of sixteen by the discovery of a Roman villa near Pau in south-west France, where the family was staying. Baring-Gould organized workmen to carry out a dig and paid them out of his own pocket. An account of his find, with a plan and drawings of the mosaics, was published by the Illustrated London News. (2) His meticulous paintings of the mosaics and plan of the villa can be seen among his papers in the Devon Record Office. (3) In the following year he had his first paper published in the journal Archaeologia, describing an ancient camp that he had discovered when the Baring-Gould family were staying at Bayonne. (4) His father wanted him to become an engineer, but the mathematics was not within his grasp. Indeed, he would later come to rely on his curate, or even one of the housemaids, to do his addition. Instead, he studied classics at Clare Hall, Cambridge, the same college that Cecil Sharp was to attend more than a quarter of a century later, and graduated with a pass degree. By this stage his romantic nature, and his mother's influence, had drawn him towards the rituals of Anglo-Catholicism, but his father would not allow him, as the eldest son, to enter the Church. …
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