Salut! Live

As someone who was born in Hove but grew up from early infancy in County Durham, I know that while you can take the man out of Sussex, you cannot necessarily take Sussex out of the man.

Bob Copper  singing Going Down to Brownsville does not sound remotely like Sleepy John Estes, a Tennessee-born hero of Bob's.

It sounds just like Bob Copper and is one of five tracks on a record that has given me more pleasure than any blues album I've heard in decades. The joy starts with the opener, Diving Duck, also from the Estes repertoire, and never fades. Bandcamp does not lend itself easily to my in-car music library but this EP is played as I drive whenever I can get my phone to agree with Apple Carplay.

Three tracks are accompanied by the False Beards - Ian A Anderson, founding editor of the much-missed fRoots magazine and a highly respected stalwart of British blues, and Ben Mandelson, a musician with a richly diverse background embracing world music, reggae and punk. The remaining two find Copper's concertina as an effective if unlikely blues instrument.

Album cover incorporating  Ian A Anderson's photo

My friend and confrere Colin Irwin, also no longer with us, was at Bobstock, a celebration of Bob Copper's life held in 2015 to mark the centenary of his birth, wrote in his admiring review of a man whose "role as English folk song’s genial and unwitting patriarch has never been more cherished". What fine and appropriate words.

Nine members of the family contributed songs at that concert as did - remarkably given their mutual struggles with dysphonia - Shirley Collins and Linda Thompson, for what my part-namesake described as an "enjoyably ramshackle" Soul of a Man, which also appears on the blues EP with the uplifting voices of all available family members.

I rather like Copper's own assessment of the importance of keeping alive, through song, the voices of common people: “Keeping a toehold on the past adds another dimension to the present and the future."

Here is a reminder of a couple of the songs that have entered the repertoires of numerous artists via the Coppers. First, a familiar song, Spencer the Rover, sung in unadorned fashion by Bob and his family.

And here Bob and concertina lead the family on Hard Times of Old England, which many will have heard by Steeleye Span.

* Prostrate With Dismal is a phrase Bob recalled, in an essay published in 1964, his father using to show his disapproval and his father's likely disapproval of a "sporadic rash" of red brick bungalows in their corner of Sussex. "He turned to me and said, 'I don't know what your ol' Grand-daddy would say, boy, if he could see this lot. Houses, 'ouses, 'ouses. Y'know that makes me prostrate with dismal'."  

** With acknowledgement, of course, to Bob's bluesman of choice, Sleepy John Estes, who would be 126 if still alive now.

And one more look at the Coppers, Bob's favourite song Thousands or More introduced and sung by two grandson. Listeners/readers/viewers may recognise it as Sorrows Away , more recently performed so beautifully by the Unthanks.

Finally, and as a mark of the family's significance, and how long ago this was recognised, let me repeat the story of Kate Lee, one of the founders of the Folk Song Society (later the English Folk Dance and Song Society).

In 1898 she met James "Brasser" Copper and his brother Thomas - Bob's father and uncle respectively - and encouraged them to sing songs to her as she plied them with whisky. "Brasser" wrote them down, some were published in the inaugural volume of the Journal of the Folk Song Society in the following year and the two brothers were made honorary members of the society.

Photo by Antiquary