HARKING back to a bygone musical age, a new collection of recordings by Essex folk singers has just been released.
The Fox and the Hare contains a mixture of traditional folk songs, music hall and recitations by five of the county’s most popular performers.
John Howson runs the Suffolk-based traditional folk music label, Veteran, which has released the CD.
He says: “Essex has a rich heritage of traditional songs, similar to the other East Anglian counties, yet it was almost completely ignored by the early folk song collectors, who would record the artists.
“Many of these, although coming from London, passed Essex by to forage in what they thought were the more fruitful counties of Suffolk and Norfolk.
“The one notable exception was Ralph Vaughan Williams who, in the early 1900s, trawled the highways and byways of the county for singers and songs. He found a wealth of songs in the county.”
In later years other collectors found what they could in Essex.
They included Russell Wortley and Neil Lanham, in the Sixties, and David Occomore and Philip Spratley, in the Seventies.
Perhaps the most remarkable of them all was the recordings of Bedfordshire collector Fred Hamer made in the small village of Tilty, just outside Great Dunmow.
John adds: “During the Sixties, he had recorded some wonderful singers from many parts of the country, most of whom had been missed by other folk song collectors. This was all the more remarkable as Fred was blind.
“In 1967, he recorded 93-year-old Harry Green and in 1998, we released that on cassette. That was the first time they had been made properly available.”
As there were just 40 minutes of recordings of Harry Green, John decided to go searching for some other Essex traditional singers and ended up discovering four more – Ernest Austin, from Great Bentley, Sugar Bailey from Shellow Bowells, just outside Chelmsford, Stan Walters, from Stansted Mountfitchet, and Lorna Tarran, from West Mersea.
The Fox and the Hare is available from local shops, priced £12.99.
For more information, visit www.veteran.co.uk
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