Cecil Sharp
Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) was the founding father of the folklore revival in England in the early twentieth century, and many of England's traditional dances and music owe their continuing existence to his work in recording and publishing them.Cecil Sharp was a music teacher interested in folk songs and music, who became interested in traditional English dance when he saw a group of Morris dancers at the village of Headington Quarry, just outside Oxford, in 1899. At this time, Morris dancing was almost extinct, and the interest generated by Sharp's notations kept the tradition alive.
The revival of the Morris dances started when Mary Neal, the organiser of the Esperance Girls' Club in London, used Sharp's (then unpublished) notations to teach the traditional dances to the club's members in 1905. Their enthusiasm for the dances persuaded Sharp to publish his notations in the form of his Morris Books, starting in 1907.
Between 1911 and 1913 he published a three-volume work, The Sword Dances of Northern England, which described the obscure and near-extinct Rapper sword dance of Northumbria and Long Sword dance of Yorkshire. This lead to the revival of both traditions in their home areas, and later elsewhere.
In 1911 Sharp founded the English Folk Dance Society which promoted the traditional dances through workshops held nationwide, and which later merged with the Folk Song Society in 1932 to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). The current London headquarters of EFDSS is named Cecil Sharp House in his honour.
Sharp also promoted English dance traditions in the USA, where the work is carried on by the Country Dance and Song Society.