Cecil Sharp Cecil James Sharp 1859-1924 On August 22 1903 Cecil Sharp noted his first folk song, The Seeds of Love, from John England in Hambridge village in Somerset. Over the following couple of years Sharp, often assisted by his friend Charles Marson, the local vicar, collected 1,500 songs in the county, many of which were published in 5 volumes of Somerset Folk Songs. Further afield in England and in the USA, Sharp later collected another 3,000 songs. He was only one of several song collectors but he helped to regenerate The Folk Song Society and to revive these songs in new contexts especially in schools. In addition he collected and published morris dances, English sword dances and country dances. Indeed he founded the English Folk Dance Society in 1911. The fact that so many people, not just in Somerset but throughout the world, are still singing the songs and dancing the dances which he collected is an indication of just how important the first event turned out to be

	Francis Child 1825-1896 Francis Child 1825-1896. gathered the lyrics to hundreds of old songs, some famous, others obscure, and edited his work into a five-volume set which today stands as the wellspring of the modern British folk revival. Child was not the only scholar to document British folk ballads -- others, notably English diarist Samuel Pepys, gathered similar collections -- but Childs was the most thorough, and the most highly regarded. In the 1950s and '70s, when modern musicians began to bring folk music back into the public light, the Child Ballads were dusted off and deeply mined by many of the folk scene's brightest stars. Traditionalists like Ewan MacColl, Martin Carthy and Shirley Collins, along with folk-rock modernists such as the Fairport Convention and Albion Band all bowed in the direction of the multi-volume codex