Songcatchers: Collecting “Lost” Ballads with Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp

Mountaineers refer to anyone who collects songs as a “songcatcher.” But Olive Dame Campbell was also a social activist for the greater part of her life. She saw an important connection between the preservation of Appalachian culture and the educational and social goals of the reformers. On a trip with her husband in 1908, Olive Campbell discovered that the old English and Scottish ballads were still being sung in the form that they first came to Appalachia with the settlers. This discovery inspired her to collect and to document both the music and the lyrics of songs that had their roots in England and Scotland. She published a few of them in 1915 and later contacted the foremost English ballad collector, Cecil Sharp, about her discovery. He was traveling and lecturing in America and was pleased to learn that many of the original Child ballads still existed in the hills and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. She collaborated with Sharp to collect more of the songs, with their music, and they published English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians in 1917. Much of this story is told in Olive Campbell’s unpublished biography of her husband, John C. Campbell. Letters detail the efforts of Olive Campbell to help the celebrated English ballad collector, Cecil Sharp, to find and record many of the lyrics and tunes that had been lost in England and Scotland where they were no longer sung.