Appalachia II - the British balads

NOTES: Some points from the reading on Cecil Sharp via Mike Yates - the idea of isolation from the city and the intimacy between landscapes that are far apart - basically, the idea of geographical distance as a static measure versus cultural distance as an intimate relationship. First, the sentiment on isolation:

"Mr Sharp told of rescuing English folk music; how he and his associates, seeking out persons untouched by the on-rush of education, had entered the workhouses and jotted down the songs of old peasants now living on the parish.  No one under 70, he said, had yielded a song worth the taking.  Another twenty years and English music would assuredly have dissolved in sophistication ...  By Mr Sharp's definition a new folk music is impossible without a complete reversion to a feudal state.  This is true, because folk music is the product of an unselfconscious peasantry; a peasantry which refuses to transmit the eccentricities of any individual; which simply omits and forgets what does not belong to the spirit of the people ...  But this is a doleful theory to propound to Americans who feel the urge of nationality.  How can we have any folk music?  We are in the clutches of compulsory education.  The farest backwoods farmer has a phonograph with records of Rubinstein's melody of F and Mischa Elman's richly sentimental reading of Dvorak's humoresque ...  Thus Mr Sharp leaves us to a barren fate, not possessing a folk music and not able to get one." (Campbell)

Second, the sentiment on intimacy:

I have been very interested in the wild flowers and ferns, comparing them with our English ones.  It is quite exciting to find every now and again exactly the same flower growing under precisely the same conditions as in England. (Sharp)

It's interesting to me the positions of isolation and connection between two seemingly distinct places, such as a "the city" and "the country." One is not itself without the other. 

What is the value of folk music outside of being an historic resource if it is not part of a future. The question Campbell asks, does "Mr. Sharp leave us to a barren fate, not possessing a folk music and not able to get one?" What does it mean to posses a folk music? In Sharp's case, it meant collecting and recording it for "posterity's sake." 

Sharp recognizes "exactly the same flower growing under the precisely the same conditions as in England." I think this observation may have something to do with this question of cultural adaptation and migration. I'm still left with a lot of questions about how this fits into our often global framework today - speaking and framing in global terms that are not clearly placed. 

A passage from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind:

"How may of you are there?"
"Thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn't planned at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. Then, over a period of twenty years or so, we met each other, traveling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan. The single most important thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we mustn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets of books, of no significance otherwise."