This article about the working relationship between Cecil Sharp and Sabine Baring-Gould appeared in the 2008 issue of Folk Music Journal. Surprisingly, it was the first article about Baring-Gould to appear in the Journal or in its predecessors. It appears here by permission of the Editor and of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. 

The abstract for the article is as follows: 

The 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 collection 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and explain their relationship, making use of letters and papers from their manuscripts as well as other published and unpublished sources.

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Gustav Holst and ‘Songs of the West’ (2011)

This article appeared in the Folk Music Journal for 2011 (Vol 10, No. 1, p. 5 – 41. It deals with the use of folk songs from Sabine Baring-Gould’s book Songs of the West by Gustav Holst in 1906 for his orchestral piece of the same name. It appears here by permission of the Editor and of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

The abstract for the article reads as follows:

Although Gustav Holst never collected English folk songs himself, he was very familiar with them through his friendship with Ralph Vaughan Williams and other collectors such as Cecil Sharp and William Gillies Whittaker. He used a number of them in his compositions and made several arrangements of folk songs collected by others. His first work founded on folk song was ‘Songs of the West’, based on Sabine Baring-Gould’s collection of songs from Devon and Cornwall – a companion piece to ‘Somerset Rhapsody’, which was based on Sharp’s collection. While ‘Somerset Rhapsody’ went on to become one of Holst’s better-known works, ‘Songs of the West’ has been largely forgotten.

Holst arranged sixteen songs from George Gardiner’s Hampshire collection for the Novello series ‘Folk Songs of England,’ as well as creating a number of choral arrangements of traditional songs. Through his friendship with Sharp he became a strong supporter of the English Folk Dance Society and taught at a number of their summer schools. His choral ballet ‘The Morning of the Year’ introduced traditional English dances under the direction of co-producer Douglas Kennedy, and was performed in 1927 by the English Folk Dance Society in support of the Cecil Sharp Memorial Fund. This article considers Holst’s engagement with English folk music, the genesis of his ‘Songs of the West’, and his wider contribution to the folk music movement in the early part of the twentieth century.

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‘Baring-Gould’s First Bibliographer’ (2010)

This article describes one of Baring-Gould’s greatest fans, Francis Nicolle, whose large bequest to Plymouth Library is one of the most important collections of material of his books, articles and other ephemera. Published in SBGAS Newsletter, Oct 2010, No. 64, p. 8.

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‘Pixies, Padfoots, and Popular Antiquities’ (2010)

This study of Baring-Gould’s engagement with folklore is based on the talks that I did on the topic in 2010 and was published in SBGAS Transactions, 2010, Vol. 10, p. 51.

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‘Dancing with Sabine Baring-Gould’ (2015)

This Research Note describes Baring-Gould’s interest in Country Dance and his creation of a Morris dancing troupe at Lew Trenchard in the years before the First World War. It appeared in Folk Music Journal, Vol. 10, No. 5, p. 637 – 643. It appears here by permission of the Editor and of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. 

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