Fourteen Fleeting Weeks

Between 1929 and 1930, Maud Karpeles, one of the leading figures in the English folk song and dance revival, undertook two song-collecting expeditions to Newfoundland. Equipped with a typewriter, notebooks for recording songs in shorthand, and a camera, she spent fourteen weeks travelling by foot, rowboat, automobile, coastal steamer, and train. Across forty-six communities in eight regions of the Island, she notated 197 songs from approximately 115 singers. Although she published little about her journeys, Karpeles kept detailed field diaries and photographed many of the people and places she encountered.Part of her collection was published in her Folk Songs from Newfoundland in 1934, with musical arrangements by Ralph Vaughan Williams and others. The book raised awareness of Newfoundland's musical heritage and became central to the Canadian folk revival. An expanded edition followed in 1970/71. Yet the full story of Karpeles's Newfoundland expeditions—and the people, places, and encounters that shaped her collecting—has remained largely untold.Fourteen Fleeting Weeks tells that story through annotated diaries, photographs, and thirty-six previously unpublished songs, provides new biographical and genealogical details of many of the singers, and highlights the impact of Karpeles's work on Newfoundland's musical heritage, the Canadian folk revival, and folklore scholarship at large.