Obituary from "The Independent"

Bob Copper
Traditional folk-singer and patriarch of the Copper Family
01 April 2004
Robert James Copper, folk-singer, folklorist and writer: born Rottingdean, Sussex 6 January 1915; MBE 2004; married 1941 Joan Deal (died 1985; one son, one daughter); died Brighton, East Sussex 29 March 2004.

Bob Copper was England's most important traditional folk-singer. On 25 March, the 89-year-old Copper, patriarch of the famed singing Copper Family, was invested as MBE "for services to folk music". His lifetime achievements went far beyond the preservation, nurturing and perpetuation of English traditional song. Strong in spirit though frail in body, he was still singing - harmony - at his annual birthday bash in January and, thankfully, he got the chance to celebrate his honour in style before his death.

Parish records locate the "Coper" family in Rottingdean in 1593. As William Cobbett might have written of them, the Coppers were "bred at the plough tail". Sandwiched in between the Downs and the English Channel, Rottingdean, in its relative isolation, allowed the family, generation to generation, to assemble a unique repertoire of song and an instinctive, natural style of harmonised singing rarely encountered in England's folk tradition.

The Copper dynasty proved pivotal in the development of the English Folk Song Society (EFSS) - since 1932 the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Over several evenings in 1898, Bob Copper's grandfather James "Brasser" Copper (1845-1927), a farm bailiff, and his brother Thomas, a pub landlord, had sung at the home of Sir Edward Carson, with voices fine-tuned by Scotch, for the folk-song collector Kate Lee. She later reminisced:

You had only to start either of them on the subject of the song and they commenced at once. "Oh, Mr Copper, can you sing me a love song, a sea song, or a plough song?" It did not matter what it was, they looked at each other significantly, and with perfectly grave faces off they would go.

Four generations on, that still applies. Apart from the grave faces.

Bob Copper had this immense cultural gift handed to him. Lee's "copper-ful of songs", published in 1899 in the first Journal of the English Folk Song Society, constituted a unique repository of songs that, half a century on, greatly influenced England's folksong revival once it was taken up by the likes of Peter Bellamy, Martin Carthy, Shirley and Dolly Collins and the Young Tradition.

One of Brasser's sons John became a shepherd, and his brother James (1882-1954), Bob Copper's father, a farm bailiff. Both sang the old songs. Bob Copper did light manual farm work before becoming a barber's lather boy and, as a teenager, a supplier of seafood to the local hotel. At the age of 18 he joined the Life Guards, hence his then nickname of "Trooper", before his parents bought him out so he could join the West Sussex Constabulary. In 1941 he married Joan Deal, whose parents ran the Central Club in Peacehaven and in due course they took over this members-only drinking club (though it later hosted many memorable folk nights).

In 1950 the Home Service broadcast a twee version of one of the Copper songs, prompting James to write a letter to the BBC. Although their songs had become unfashionable, the family tradition, James Copper wrote, was still very much alive. Country Magazine's Francis Collinson was on their doorstep within the week.

His visit lit the blue touch-paper for a series of events, notably the Copper family's broadcasting début that August, Bob Copper's introduction to the Texas-born expatriate folklorist Alan Lomax (who collected them for the US Library of Congress), and, what his son John Copper described in The Copper Family Song Book: a living tradition (1995) as a "brief but highly productive period of working part-time as a roving reporter and folk-song collector for the BBC" - the basis for Bob Copper's second book, Songs and Southern Breezes: country folk and country ways (1973).

It was collecting for his BBC radio Sunday-morning programme As I Roved Out that led to Bob Copper's "discovery" of Shirley Collins and, although little entered his repertoire, one notable exception was Noah Gillette's "The Bonny Bunch of Roses-O" which Copper recorded for Song Links (2003), a project recording English traditional songs and their Australian variants.

After their fathers' deaths, Bob and his cousin Ron (1912-1978) soldiered on, making a handful of recordings, notably Traditional Songs from Rottingdean (1963). Bob's son John joined the line-up in 1964, adding a long-haired touch, while his daughter Jill joined in 1971, although she had made an impromptu stage début at the Young Tradition's farewell concert in November 1969, thus adding the first female voice to the tradition. John's wife, Lynne, and Jill's husband, Jon Dudley (now an honorary Copper), also subsequently sang with them.

Coinciding with the publication of Bob Copper's first book, A Song For Every Season (1971, republished 1997), Bill Leader produced a lavish four-LP boxed set of the same name, arguably Britain's most ambitious project of its kind before the advent of the compact disc. Its current unavailability is keenly felt.

Copper had "found his pen", and continued writing with Early to Rise: a Sussex boyhood (1976); Across Sussex With Belloc (1995), a retracing of Hilaire Belloc's 1911 work The Four Men; and Bob Copper's Sussex (1997). He also recorded Sweet Rose in June (1978) but that was the year he began nursing his ailing wife until her death in 1985, after which he resumed singing on a more regular basis.

Coppersongs: a living tradition (1988) included three of his grandchildren - Ben, Lucy and Thomas - singing "Thousands or More", while during the late 1990s, his three other grandchildren, Mark, Andy and Sean, joined them in concert and on records including Coppersongs: III (1998). Still singing and enjoying his every breath and every beer, Bob Copper delighted in the fact that his grandchildren were singing the family's songs.

Ken Hunt