Obituary from "Surrey Folk News"

When Bob Copper died on 20th March, 2004, aged 89, the south-east of England lost its last great country singer;  Gordon Hall predeceased him by less than 5 years and Louisa Fuller by only a few weeks.

Robert James Copper was born on 6th January 1915, in Rottingdean, then a rural Sussex village, son to Jim, a farm bailiff.  As a farm-boy, he performed various menial jobs, notably as a bird-scarer, before becoming apprenticed to a local barber.  In 1932, approaching 18, Bob enlisted in the Household Cavalry, where he was disappointed to miss any active service.  To compensate, he joined the West Sussex Constabulary but soon, he said, grew tired of being "P.C. Copper".  He became a publican and, whilst managing the Central Club in Peavehaven with his wife Joan, whom he married in 1941, he wrote to Francis Collinson, producer of the BBC's Country Magazine.

Collinson visited the Central Club, to find Bob, his father and cousin Ron singing songs that Kate Lee, a founder-member of the English Folk Song Society, had collected from the family in 1898.  He discovered that at least one of their songs, "Shepherd of the Downs", had been part of the family repertoire for 7 generations and that Bob's father and grandfather had preserved most of their material in meticulous, if eccentrically-spelt, copperplate.  Bob himself began to collect songs for the BBC and it was through the Corporation that the Copper Family's worldwide reputation was established.

Bob Copper was a humourous, erudite and essentially kindly man, who, despite his fame, retained his love of music (English traditional and American country blues) and a pint or two of ale right to the end of his long life.  He wrote several fine books, among them "A Song for Every Season", which won the prestigious Robert Pitman prize in 1971, and "Across Sussex with Belloc", a pastiche of Hilaire Belloc's "The Four Men", greatly surpassing the original.

Belatedly, Bob Copper was made a Member of the British Empire, for services to folk music, in the year 2004 New Year's Honours List and he was presented with the award just four days before his death.  His wife died in 1983 but he is sruvived by 2 children and 6 grand children.  They will surely continue the Copper Family tradition, in Britain, the USA and beyond, but Bob himself transcends the cliche: his like will never be seen again.

Tony Dean - Elsie's Band.