Maud Karpeles - Collaborator With Cecil Sharp

Collaborator With Cecil Sharp

In 1914 Sharp went to the USA to a Shakespeare production to teach choreographed folk dances to the actors, and to give lectures. Later in 1914, all folk dancing lectures and classes ceased during the First World War. Sharp's first collaborator had been Mary Neal. She had formed another dance group, the Espérance Club of Morris Dancers. When Mary Neal moved in the direction of Women's Suffrage, Sharp distanced himself from her, and adopted Maud Karpeles instead, as his main assistant. Sharp returned to the Appalachian Mountains in 1916, this time together with Maud Karpeles. They collected over 1,500 tunes (over 500 different songs) in a period of 46 weeks in isolated communities. Many of them were obviously related to songs they had encountered in England. This strengthened their conviction that folk songs were subject to a kind of Darwinian selection over generations, and diffusion across the sea. These songs and tunes were published in 1932.

At the end of the war, neither Mary Neal's Espérance Guild, nor Maud's group reformed. Effectively the folk dance movement changed from being working class to being middle class. Sharp arranged for teachers to give classes in country dance and morris, to members of the society, using his books for guidance. Choirs were created to sing folk songs in unison, even though all the singers who had provided the songs, had normally sung solo. After about 1920, Sharp ceased to collect dances - he was then in his 60s - but Karpeles was only in her 30s. She collected clog-morris dances from the north-west of England, in Royton and Abram. She continued to collect English country dances in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929 Cecil Sharp House opened and William Kimber and Maud Karpeles laid the foundation stone.