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5 The American Branch
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| 117 5 The American Branch No country in the world can be gay in the simple, fresh way that England can—it is our contribution to civilization. —Cecil Sharp, 1916, on his “Interlude” for the New York celebration of Shakespeare’s tercentenary winning first prize [The English] . . . songs and dances are not foreign importations , but a vital part of the traditional culture of America. —Maud Karpeles, February 2, 19281 In the years between 1915 and 1918, Cecil Sharp put his stamp on the American Branch of the EFDSS as an authoritative outpost of Englishness as he imagined it. During three extended collecting trips in the southern Appalachian Mountains, he also advanced the belief that native American song and dance was an extension of Englishness—a pure representation of an English tradition that had been lost in the mother country but preserved in the backwoods by generations of English settlers. Sharp did not pioneer this view, however. Only a few years earlier in 1911, a Transylvania University professor had published an article in the Sewanee Review documenting what he called “British ballads” in the Cumberland Mountains and noting a veritable cottage industry of newly organized Southern State Folklore Societies , and English professors had followed his lead. By the time Sharp began his collecting trips, over a dozen articles on southern mountain ballads had already been published in the Journal of American Folklore. Rather then pioneering or “discovering” the Appalachian ballads, then, Sharp’s contribution consisted of the sheer volume of songs and variations he collected and “in his ability to crystallize and extend trends,” most especially in building a folk song and dance movement around them.2 Moreover, working to build an English Country Dance community in the States and staff it with trusted English women he had trained, he increasingly came to understand himself as establishing an Anglo-American transatlantic dance tradition that could revitalize the “race” on both sides of the ocean. 118 | The American Branch In the next two decades, as Sharp’s American followers took on his mission , they increasingly worried about ensuring a leading role for English Country Dance in the folk revival. They realized the American Branch of EFDS was but one of many ethnic urban folk centers among a wide range of immigrant cultures with folk dance traditions. One person in particular— and again it was a strong woman—embodied the alternative vision of an International Folk Dance of the peoples of many lands, and she found herself as the center of conflict with the American Branch, and most especially with Sharp: Elizabeth Burchenal. By 1915, Burchenal had already been transcribing and publishing dances “from people of many lands and immigrants for the past 12 summers,” had introduced dances from all these lands into the public schools, and had pioneered International Folk Dance programs that expressed the shared vitality of folk dance traditions. She wrote to Sharp then of her deep respect for him as “the only person” besides herself “whose life is devoted to folk dancing . . . and whose feeling is the same” as hers about it. But while Sharp applauded English folk dancing as “probably the best and certainly, technically , the most accurate and definite” folk dance tradition and expected it would dominate over other forms, Elizabeth Burchenal averred to him that “all things good in dancing are in the folk traditions of all countries.”3 So almost a year after the formation of the American Branch, in February 1916, she announced the organization in New York of the American Folkdance Society, with herself as president. Then, two years later, just as Sharp was completing his pathbreaking field work in Appalachia, she published a volume of twenty-eight American contra dances. In the volume’s introduction , acknowledging that her society’s actual work would not begin until after the war, she staked out her leadership role in the collection and preservation of American “folk-dances and music at their original sources” with the development of an Archive of American Folk-Dance.4 Burchenal had thrown down the folk gauntlet. Differences between Sharp and Burchenal emerged in a series of conflicts in the next years, over everything from copyrights to the leadership of the New York dance community. But the American Branch’s growth and, more so, its claim to a leading position in folk dance in the United States became a struggle with greater stakes. For Sharp and his devoted followers , who believed in the superior cultural value of the English folk dance...