Maud Pauline Karpeles

Maud Pauline Karpeles (London, 12 November 1885 – London, 1 October 1976) was one of the most prominent figures in the study and dissemination of English folk song and dance. Her name is inseparably linked with that of the collector Cecil Sharp, with whom she shared much of her career in the cause of a revival of English folklore.

The decisive contact came in 1909, when Karpeles, who was looking for teaching material for her social work with children, attended morris dancing competitions judged by Sharp at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. Captivated, she enrolled in Sharp's first morris dance school at the South Western Polytechnic in London. Encouraged by him, she gathered friends and in 1910 founded the Folk Dance Club, whose members formed the core of the English Folk Dance Society, established by Sharp in 1911. Karpeles joined its committee and took part in the group that gave demonstrations during Sharp's lectures and trained dancers; her dancing was especially admired. After Sharp fell ill in 1913, she increasingly took on directorial duties.

When the First World War broke out, Sharp moved his activity to North America, and Karpeles joined him there in 1916. Over 46 weeks they visited remote settlements in the Appalachian Mountains of the southern United States, where they collected 1,612 variants of "folksongs of English origin". After Sharp's death in 1924, leadership of the society passed to his brother-in-law Douglas Kennedy, although Karpeles was reportedly better qualified for the post. Her defence of Sharp's educational approach earned her growing opposition from male colleagues, who conceived of folk dance differently. Following the dispute over the copyright of Sharp's work in 1937–38, she resigned and concentrated her efforts on folk song.

During this period she played a prominent role in founding the International Folk Music Council in 1947, of which she was secretary for fifteen years and honorary president in 1963. She prepared new editions of Sharp's material and, between 1929 and 1930, carried out the collecting in Newfoundland that he had never managed to undertake. She also wrote a biography of Sharp, in collaboration with A. H. Fox Strangways in 1933, and in 1967 published an expanded version under her own name, which is regarded as less reliable and markedly partisan.

Her legacy is ambivalent. She received honorary doctorates from Laval University (1961) and Memorial University of Newfoundland (1970), as well as the OBE in 1961. However, as research progressed, her editions of Sharp's work and of the Newfoundland songs, along with her Introduction to English Folk Song, came under increasing criticism. Nevertheless, her work remains a point of reference for understanding the English folk movement of the early twentieth century.