Bob Copper ranks among the venerable figures of the British folk world, having delivered numerous distinguished recorded performances while also gathering hundreds of traditional songs, many of them gathered during a BBC research initiative in the 1950s. The Copper Family stands as a longstanding pillar of that same scene, its lineup shifting across generations yet always comprising several family members spanning great-grandfather to great-grandchild. In early 2001 Bob Copper’s own achievements received formal recognition when Billy Bragg presented him with the Good Tradition Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor that underscored how Bragg’s own deep reservoir of folk songwriting would have been impossible without the earlier fieldwork Copper had undertaken.
Those labors extended to the release of song collections including A Song for Every Season and Bob Copper’s Sussex. What distinguishes this particular Copper from the authors of countless other substantial songbooks is the breadth of his abilities, above all his command of prose. A man whose résumé once listed singer, song collector, musician, mummer, painter, engraver, illustrator, writer, poet, reviewer, broadcaster, rook scarer, lather boy, soldier, policeman, and publican has produced enduring volumes, frequently adorned with his own drawings and filled with affectionate recollections of his father Jim Copper’s era together with penetrating observations on the character of folk music itself. Because so much of the repertoire springs from the daily work of ordinary people, Copper’s observation remains indispensable across traditions from country blues to the laments of Algerian pearl divers: “(One can) really believe in a song about the plough when it is sung by a ploughman, but, be it ever so sweetly sung by a man who does not know a share from a coulter or a whipple-tree from a pratt-pin, it will never sound quite the same.”
The very act of obtaining these pieces from retired ploughmen supplies its own comic episodes. Many older singers, detecting the scent of payment in what is, after all, the music business, approached the idealistic collector with notable assertiveness, just as their predecessors had done decades earlier when Rudyard Kipling wandered the same countryside in search of comparable material. American musicologist Alan Lomax later conveyed the essence of these performances to wider audiences through his own recordings of Copper and other traditional U.K. artists, issued across several compilations. Both Lomax and Copper routinely receive composer credit on numerous public-domain items simply because of their publishing activities; in Copper’s instance the British publishing apparatus, plainly in need of clearer vision, repeatedly conflates his name with that of any number of other traditional performers called Bob Cooper.
