English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians

Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles collected these songs during fieldwork trips through the southern Appalachian mountains between 1916 and 1918, transcribing tunes and texts directly from local singers in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. Sharp, an English folklorist, was struck by the degree to which isolated mountain communities had preserved British ballad traditions largely unchanged from their Old World origins. The two-volume collection, edited by Karpeles and published by Oxford University Press in 1932, eight years after Sharp’s death, documents 274 songs and ballads with 968 tune variants collected from individual singers, and remains a primary reference for British-American ballad scholarship.This two-volume Oxford University Press edition is a later, enlarged edition of a book first published in 1917 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons as English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, Comprising 122 Songs and Ballads, and 323 Tunes, collected by Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp. The 1917 title page names Campbell first as co-collector. The 1932 title page credits the collection to Sharp alone, with Campbell listed as the contributor of thirty-nine tunes and Karpeles as editor. Contents and pagination differ substantially between the two, and the 1932 edition adds sections of jigs and play-party games not present in the first.