Scholarly interest in English folk music started when the American philologist Francis James Child, editor of Elizabethan plays, undertook a three-year stint of studies in Göttingen and Berlin. Here he followed lectures from the Grimm brothers and developed an interest in the oral-vernacular roots of literature. Appointed professor of rhetoric at Harvard in 1851, he took charge of a 130-volume collection of the works of the British poets; one of the volumes in this enterprise, on English and Scottish ballads, alerted him to the scarcity of sources for this material, leading him to collaborate with Furnivall’s Early English Texts Society, and, together with Furnivall, to found the Ballad Society.

Child, appointed to the newly-founded, Humboldt-style Johns Hopkins University in 1876, with a chair in English founded for the purpose, then went on to inventorize the documented sources of balladry, taking inspiration from his contacts with Svend Grundtvig and his collection of Danmarks gamle folkeviser (1853), and with the Sicilian collector Giuseppe Pitrè. Child also imparted his interests in the American Folklore Society, whose first president he became in 1888. He published The English and Scottish popular ballads in 10 volumes between 1882 and 1889. Although this material was intended to throw light on the popular and traditional rootedness of the material, it was gathered from earlier collections, mainly printed broadsides, not noted down from recitation.

Within England, editing (publishing in harmonized form) of traditional music had started with William Chappell, scion of a family of music publishers and later a co-founder of the Percy Society, who had published a Collection of national English airs, consisting of ancient song, ballad, and dance tunes in 1838; it was republished in 1855 as Popular music of the olden time, and again as Old English popular music in 1892; the conflation (under the rubric “national” or “English”) of the tunes’ demotic nature and their antiquity is telling. Meanwhile, clergymen had also begun collecting the folk songs of their rural parishes, starting with John Broadwood, who as early as 1843 had collected and printed 16 songs from Sussex. The very title of this collection bespeaks a similar nostalgic idylliicsm: Old English songs, as now sung by the peasantry of the Weald of Surrey and Sussex and collected by one who has learnt them by hearing them sung every Christmas from early childhood by the country people, who go about to the neighbouring houses, singing, or “Wassailing” as it is called, at that season; the airs are set to music exactly as they are now sung, to rescue them from oblivion and to afford a specimen of genuine Old English melody; the words are given in their original rough state with an occasional slight alteration to render the sense intelligible. The outstanding specimen of regional collections by clergymen is the Devon- and Cornwall-sourced Songs of the West (4 vols, 1889-91), by Sabine Baring-Gould in collaboration with Henry Fleetwood Sheppard. Baring-Gould had a wide range of antiquarian and folklore interests in addition to music. Besides playing a key role in the development and national standardization of Anglican hymns (he authored the national-religious classic Onward Christian soldiers, and together with Sheppard published Church songs in 1884), he also published widely about the manners, superstitions, and character types of the West Country. Other clergymen’s collections include Northumbrian minstrelsy (Bruce & Stokoe, 1882) and Wiltshire folk songs and carols (Hill, 1890). Such regional collecting culminated in the 5-volume landmark Folk songs from Somerset (1904-09), by Cecil Sharp (on whom more below). The nostalgic conservatism of such collections played into an English self-image that stood at odds with industrial modernity: an England of country parishes in the shires timelessly continuing their ancient, folk-rooted traditions. Thomas Hardy’s novella Under the greenwood tree (1872), featuring a band of carolling songsters and their traditional communitarian music-making (threatened by the modern trend for organ-accompanied hymning), helped to connect folk song to a sentimental-rustic self-image of idyllic “Englishness” – one of the main carriers of English nationalism in the 20th century.

In 1890 an expanded edition of Broadwood’s Old English songs was publishe by his niece, Lucy Broadwood (1858–1929), under the title Sussex songs. Lucy Broadwood went on to collect more specimens in different areas and published the more ambitious collection English county songs in 1893 (a collaboration with the music critic J. Fuller Maitland); she later followed this with English traditional carols and songs (1908). Broadwood and Fuller Maitland were among the founding members of the Folk Song Society (est. 1898), with Broadwood later becoming editor of its periodical, the Folk song journal. From the beginning the Folk Song Society cultivated links with the newly flourishing English musical scene around the Royal College of Music (1883).The college’s leading teachers were made vice-presidents: Charles Villiers Stanford, Alexander Mackenzie, and Hubert Parry. Parry delivered an inaugural lecture which higlighted the importance of the folk tradition for standards of musical taste, while at the same time displaying an extraordinarily patronizing attitude concerning the rural peasantry, repository of national heirlooms yet prone to heedelessly abandoning these for modern tastelessness. Another sign of the Society’s outreach to classical music was the fact that composers like Elgar, Dvořák, and Grieg (who were evidently considered to have taken inspiration from popular music) were made honorary members.

The Folk Song Society brought many influential collectors and musicians together, such as Frank Kidson, who had published Old English country dances and Traditional tunes in 1890 and 1891. The society was given a more demotic and less nostalgic-patronizing direction when the politically left-leaning  Cecil Sharp (1859–1924) made his appearance, a music teacher who felt that English musical life was too strongly dominated by German influences and wanted to regenerate it from native sources. For Sharp, traditional music was part of a rural lifestyle which also included pastimes like dance – it was Sharp who recorded and revived the practice of morris-dancing, and who founded the English Folk Dance Society (1911), with which the Folk Song Society merged in 1932 to form the (still-existing) English Folk Dance and Song Society. Sharp’s standing was such that folk music became generally accepted as a regenerative force in public life – in 1906, the Board of Education officially sanctioned the teaching of folk songs in schools. Sharp had classically-trained composers among his collaborators, like George Butterworth (1885–1916, a keen folk dancer), the Australian Percy Grainger, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Performances of revived music and dance were stimulated as a wholesome and educationally useful pastime, culminating in a music festival for amateur choirs, the Leith Hill Music Festival (1905). Sharp’s prominent position in cultural and associational life made him an important go-between when classical composers also began to draw on English folk music for inspiration in their own compositions. Vaughan Williams reworked a number of old songs for the Anglican hymnal, which came to occupy a pivotal position in the musical life of England’s Anglican state Church. Ironically, Vaughan Williams’s English hymnal (1906) was the successor to the 1861 collection Hymns ancient and modern, whose introduction had ousted the older, now-vanished tradition of local carols and hymns that had been recorded by the first generation of clergyman-collectors.