Helen Creighton (1899-1989)

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Helen Creighton was a pioneering folklorist who devoted her life to preserving and promoting Nova Scotia’s unique folk culture. Between 1928 and 1975, Creighton conducted field research that resulted in one of Canada’s largest collections of songs, tales, customs, and material culture. This included more than 4,000 recordings gathered from Nova Scotia’s British, Acadian, Gaelic, German, African-Nova Scotian, and Mi’kmaw communities. Her collections, lectures, broadcasts, and films about her work helped to disseminate and popularize the cultural traditions of the Maritimes in ways that have had enduring resonance throughout the region and across Canada.

Born in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in 1899, Helen Creighton studied music at McGill University and graduated from Halifax Ladies College. In the early 1920s, she started her career as a journalist, writing for Mayfair, Saturday Night, the Montreal Star, and the Toronto Star Weekly, among other Canadian publications. She established a regional reputation as the first “Station Aunt,” on Halifax radio station CHNS, where she wrote and hosted weekly half-hour broadcasts. Creighton joined the Canadian Authors Association in 1926.

During the 1920s, Creighton struck out on a new career path collecting folksongs. Her field research began in Eastern Passage, near Halifax, and eventually extended throughout the Maritimes provinces. Although often discounted by male folklorists as a woman without academic credentials, Creighton emerged as one of the most important figures in her field. She wrote more than 80 publications, including scholarly articles, as well as numerous popular song and story collections, the best known of which is Bluenose Ghosts (1957). Creighton was also affiliated with prominent collecting institutions, and from 1947 to 1967, she worked as a researcher for the National Museum of Canada (now the Canadian Museum of History). She also collected for the Library of Congress in the United States and won several Rockefeller Foundation fellowships.

Throughout her career, Creighton promoted Nova Scotia folk culture and worked to share it with broad audiences. She lectured across North America, and hosted a ground-breaking radio series in 1938 and 1939 as part of the CBC Folksong Broadcasts, where she introduced Canadians to her collections. From the late 1940s onward, Creighton and her work frequently were featured on radio and television, and she was the subject of three National Film Board documentaries. The recipient of six honorary doctorates, Creighton was also inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and as a Member into the Order of Canada. By the time of her death in 1989, Creighton had become an important and popular cultural figure, and she was beloved in her home province. One of the songs she collected, “The Nova Scotia Song,” has become the province’s unofficial anthem, “Farewell to Nova Scotia.”

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