[5][6][7] He published an extensive series of songbooks based on his fieldwork, often with piano arrangements, and wrote an influential theoretical work, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions.

Over the last four decades, Sharp's work has attracted heated debate, with claims and counter-claims regarding selectivity, nationalism, appropriation, bowdlerisation and racism.

Sharp had made many friends and an address with over 300 signatures asked him to continue his work at Adelaide, but he decided to return to England and arrived there in January 1892.

[17][20] Sharp was not the first to research folk songs in England, which had already been studied by late-19th century collectors like Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson and Sabine Baring-Gould.

[2] In August 1903, Sharp visited the home of his friend Charles Marson, a Christian Socialist he had met in Adelaide, and by then a vicar in Hambridge, Somerset.

Sharp, assisted initially by Marson, worked by asking around in rural Somerset communities for people who might sing old songs and located many informants, the sisters Louisa Hooper and Lucy White of Langport amongst the most prolific.

[21] Sharp was able to relate well to people of a different social class,[3] and established friendships with several singers; after his death Louisa Hooper wrote of his generosity in terms of payments, gifts and outings.

[33] He made many photographic portraits of singers at their homes or workplaces, providing a valuable record of life amongst rural working people in both South-West England and the Appalachian Mountains.

His colleagues Frank Kidson and Lucy Broadwood, did not share his view, however, and the committee of the Folk-Song Society voted to approve the Board's list, causing a rift with Sharp.

[4] This implied that songs had no individual composer, since they had evolved to their present form "as the pebble on the sea shore is rounded and polished by the action of the waves".

Given the prudery of the Edwardian era, these could never have been published in full (especially in a school textbook), but Sharp did note such lyrics accurately in his field notebooks, thus preserving them for posterity.

[40] During the years of the First World War, Sharp found it difficult to support himself through his customary work in England, and decided to try to earn his living in the United States.

In remote log cabins Sharp would notate the tunes by ear, while Karpeles took down the words, and they collected songs from singers including Jane Hicks Gentry, Mary Sands and young members of the Ritchie family of Kentucky.

[44]This strong focus on 'Englishness' is evident in Sharp's work, and he has been criticised for failing to recognise that many of the songs he collected were derived from the Scottish rather than the English ballad tradition.

For instance, having witnessed in white communities a form of square dancing that he christened the “Kentucky Running Set”, Sharp interpreted it inaccurately as the survival of a 17th-century English style, whereas in fact it contained significant African-American and European elements.

"[44] However, unlike other mountain collectors of the time he did take down ballads from two Black singers, one of whom he described in his field notes thus: “Aunt Maria [Tomes] is an old coloured woman who was a slave belonging to Mrs Coleman... she sang very beautifully in a wonderfully musical way and with clear and perfect intonation... rather a nice old lady".

Their collection was described by ballad expert Bertrand Bronson as “without question the foremost contribution to the study of British-American folk-song”, and by Archie Green as a “monumental contribution… an unending scroll in cultural understanding”.

[47][48] However, it can be argued that a fascination with Child Ballads and other old British material led him and the other fieldworkers of his era to misrepresent Appalachian folk music as an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon or Celtic tradition, and overlook its cultural diversity.

[49] Elizabeth DiSavino, in her 2020 biography of Katherine Jackson French, has claimed that Sharp had neglected to give proper acknowledgement to female and Scottish-diaspora sources, although in fact he mentioned both in his Introduction to English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.

[2] While at Cambridge, Sharp heard the lectures of William Morris, which probably influenced his later self-description as a ‘conservative socialist’, since his opposition to capitalism went alongside a suspicion of the Industrial Revolution and modernity in general, and a belief in the virtues of rural over urban life.

[41] He also believed in democracy over totalitarianism, holding that “any form of collectivist government must also be democratic if it is to function properly”, and expressing scepticism about the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

[2] Despite this, he maintained a friendly relationship with his sister Evelyn, an avid suffragist who was imprisoned for her activities; after her release from Holloway she wrote to Sharp stating that she had no wish to quarrel over the matter, and that she did not believe he was a “confirmed ‘anti’”.

[9] He rejected Sharp’s claim that folk song could be found only in isolated rural communities as “primitive romanticism”, and described his piano arrangements as “false and unrepresentative”, but praised his ability as a collector, admired his analysis of modal tunes, and used numerous examples from his manuscripts as illustrations.

[57] A more radical Marxist analysis was offered in the 1970s by David Harker, questioning the motivations and methods of folk revivalists, and accusing Sharp of having manipulated his research for ideological reasons.

[58] According to Harker: "'[F]olk song' as mediated by Cecil Sharp, [is] to be used as 'raw material' or 'instrument', being extracted from a tiny fraction of the rural proletariat and... imposed upon town and country alike for the people's own good, not in its original form, but, suitably integrated into the Conservatoire curriculum, made the basis of nationalistic sentiments and bourgeois values.

"Harker expanded this thesis in the influential Fakesong in 1985, dismissing the concept of folk song as "intellectual rubble which needs to be shifted so that building can begin again", and attacking scholars from Francis James Child to A. L.

[9] Folk song collecting, scholarship, and revival were viewed as forms of appropriation and exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the working class, and Sharp in particular was strongly criticised.

"[60][3] A more critical analysis was offered by C. J. Bearman, who noted numerous statistical discrepancies in Harker's claims that Sharp and Marson's choices of songs for publication were unrepresentative: "It is an interesting variety of mistake which so consistently produces errors in favour of the argument being presented.”[12] Bearman also disputed Harker's claims of mass bowdlerisation, on grounds firstly of factual misrepresentation and exaggeration, secondly for ignoring constraints on publishing erotic material in the Edwardian era, and thirdly for omitting the fact that Sharp had been open about his edits and preserved the original texts.

Henry Shapiro held him responsible in part for the perception of Appalachian mountain culture as "Anglo-Saxon", while Benjamin Filene and Daniel Walkowitz claimed that Sharp had neglected to collect fiddle tunes, hymns, recent compositions, and songs of African-American origin.