'You Never Heard So Sweet': The Copper Family of Rottingdean, Singing for Eight Generations
For the uninitiated, the Copper Family songbook usually comes as a tremendous surprise. This collection of English folksongs dating back to the eighteenth century (and probably beyond) is characterised by soaring foursquare melodies --which often bring to mind Anglican hymn tunes-- and wistfully poetic lyrics about the joys of Maytime, sheep-shearing, good ale, and true love. To give perhaps the most charming of many examples, When Spring Comes In begins thus:
“When Spring comes in the birds do sing, The lambs do skip and the bells do ring While we enjoy their glorious charm so noble and so gay, The primrose blooms and the cowslip too, The violets in their sweet return, the roses shining through the briar, And the daffadown-dillies which we admire will die and fade away.”
In a similarly bucolic vein, the autobiographical Spencer the Rover, in which the narrator tells of his journeying across “Great Britain and most parts of Wales” to find prosperity, has a delightful happy ending. Spencer gets as far as Yorkshire, but then “thoughts of his babies lamenting their father” send him straight back home, where his children drive away his cares “with their prittle-prattling stories,” and he settles down to live with his family “like bees in one hive,” in a cottage “with woodbine and roses growing all around the door.” (There is no further reference to the economic pressures that sent him roaming in the first place.) A lot of the repertoire is like this, full of an innocent joy so contrary to the modern mood that it can be challenging to wrap one’s head around it.
In these songs the particularity of East Sussex rural life often takes on a universal, mysterious beauty. This is especially true of what, to my mind, is the jewel in the Copper crown, Come Write Me Down (its title somewhat spookily anticipating the family’s project of recording the songs for posterity), in which the story of an ostensibly ordinary country courtship is transcended by a tranquil, radiant confidence in the eternal power of love. There is also the enchanting and puzzling passage in The Banks of the Sweet Primroses in which the heroine decides to escape to “some lonely valley/Where no man on earth shall e'er me find/Where the pretty little small birds do change their voices,/And every moment blows blusterous wind.”
The songs form a cultural treasure that the Copper dynasty, farm workers and shepherds tied to the land in Rottingdean up until the 1930s, have kept in trust by performing it in their unique style for at least (by this point) eight generations. As a longtime devotee of this repertoire, I was thrilled to chat with Jill Copper and her husband Jon Dudley before Christmas. (After marrying Jill, Jon became a part of the Copper clan and the singing group.) We talked at length about the music, the environment from which it came, and Jill’s father, the much-missed Bob Copper, who helped to re-popularise the repertoire after the Second World War, particularly with his 1971 award-winning book A Song for Every Season.
One aspect that I have always found intriguing is the songs’ overall peaceful contentedness, suggesting a level of happiness in Rottingdean that jars with many English rural memoirs, not to mention most of Hardy. (Although the origins of the songs are largely shrouded in mystery, the family’s choice of material to make their own was significant, with a mostly consistent focus on the optimistic and cheerful.) The Coppers tell me that, indeed, when the songs first became widely known, some people found their sunniness suspicious and even accused Bob of having written them himself! (The lack of a genuine protest song in the canon aroused particular misgivings. Hard Times of Old England, about the post-Napoleonic Wars depression, is more a plaintive recounting of difficult facts than an expression of anger, and concludes with the buoyant hope of “jolly good times” ahead.)
Jon explains that one possible reason why the material is light-hearted is simply that the villagers in Rottingdean were pretty content until the Great Depression, unusually fortunate in working for a Quaker landowner who treated them well and was particularly careful to avoid the seasonal unemployment that plagued other estates in East Sussex --so that even though wages were lower in winter, nobody was thrown out of work. Otherwise, Bob’s grandmother (who was, they are both keen to point out, a lovely woman) censored any songs that she found even slightly objectionable. She even went so far as to ban Tarry Trousers --one of the curious English traditional genre in which a determined young woman cross-dresses in order to pursue her beloved into the Navy-- not because of the transvestism, but because it contains a reference to trousers smelling of tar. This, and music-hall songs such as Corduroy, were not allowed in the house and had to be sung down at the pub instead, with the result that they appear not to have made it into the more official repertoire.
In addition to their joyful songs, the Coppers’ polyphonic harmonies, beautiful combinations of clearly distinguishable individual voices, are something very special --particularly for England, as Jon points out. The opera singer Mrs Kate Lee, a founder of the Folk Song Society who discovered James (‘Brasser’) and Thomas Copper (Bob’s grandfather and great-uncle) in 1896 and wrote down fifty songs from them with the encouragement of a bottle of whisky, commented that she had never heard that kind of harmony before. This sound, often infused with a soulful melancholy at odds with the boisterous themes of drinking songs like Good Ale, developed “way back” and has been honed over the centuries. There is documentary evidence that a Copper born in 1784 habitually sang in harmony with his brother, since Jill’s great-grandfather ‘Brasser’ Copper noted down in 1924 that he remembered the two of them singing a particular song. Indeed, the Coppers may have been singing for even longer than that -- Gentlemen of High Renown has rather medieval-sounding, sinuous vocal lines. The family have been living in the Rottingdean area since at least 1593, when parish records began and an Edward Coper (an extra p was added sometime later) got married. (The whole family have been to see and touch the vellum page at the local record office.) However, just as they never really consider how unusual it is to have been in the same place for four centuries, they view their extraordinarily old-fashioned repertoire simply as something that they have in the family.
Jill thinks that the harmonies are the natural result of singing together with the people you love most: the upsurge of emotion and affection magically produces this unique resonance. In turn, group singing is the glue that keeps this obviously very close family bonded. The fact that the younger generation are furthering the tradition makes Jon, Jill and her brother John very happy, even though the group is now so huge that when they go out performing they have to charter a minibus. This has had the advantage of adding more women’s voices to a sound which, up until Jill’s joining in the late 1960s, was exclusively male, because the singing mostly went on down at the pub (at that time women didn’t want to visit pubs because they knew that there would be men “spitting and swearing” in there). Even though the younger generation is mostly male, a niece now sings with them, and the three older Coppers are interested to see what will happen with their ten grandchildren, who are predominantly female. At the moment two boys and three girls have joined the singing, but if more girls get involved it will then tip the family sound in the other direction, which will be interesting.The children in the family have never been hothoused to learn the songs but have absorbed them by osmosis, while playing on the floor or upstairs in the house, and later come to them of their own accord. Singing at home happened mostly at Christmastime, a very big thing that still continues at Jill and Jon’s house in Peacehaven. About thirty people sit around the table singing the Copper carols, although they no longer carry on the peculiar custom of singing the unusually morbid number Babes in the Wood around the rabbit pie and cold beef and trying to get the assigned lines out between mouthfuls, a custom which stopped immediately after the war. Nobody knows why the family chose that song (“it's a ghastly story," says Jon), and Jill can only think that it was because it mentions a robin, which someone must have found festive enough to warrant including it in the family celebrations.
Jill herself did not sing in public until she was twenty-seven, which was considered a novelty at the time, and she is very proud to have been the first girl in the family to be involved in public singing. It was not simply because the singing was concentrated in the pub that she took a while to come round: she had been mortified at sixteen by seeing Bob and her grandfather Jim Copper on TV in 1960 performing folksongs, to which her generation, at that time, still had an allergic reaction: “I never told a soul about it because I thought it was so embarrassing!” (One of the highlights of Jill’s recording career is her beautiful rendition of the mysterious and ornate morning song Sweet Lemany on the double LP A Song for Every Season.)
Rottingdean’s unusual circumstances, secluded on the coast in an isolated county and overseen by a benevolent landlord, allowed it to develop --as Bob pointed out in his book-- a unique micro-culture in which sometimes astonishing individuality flourished and was accepted. There was not a great deal of outside influence because the inhabitants didn’t leave the village much: going to Brighton, five miles away, was considered something of an adventure, and Bob (born in 1915) knew some elderly villagers (or ‘ol’ kiddies’) who had never even been that far. However, there was one very adventurous old shepherd who decided, in about 1910, to go on a day trip to London (the Brighton-London rail service had been going since 1841). So he went to London for the day, came back and went to the pub, where everyone clustered round to hear what he had discovered. He said, “oh, it was wonderful, it’s all covered over, you know.” He had never left Victoria Station and thought, with all its shops and bustle, that it was London. In A Song for Every Season Bob captures the surprising richness of what outsiders might assume to be a somewhat limited existence in the village, its seasonal round of custom and celebration tied to events in the farming year (such as ’Tater Beer Night, and its special songs, down at the pub). A great deal of pomp and ceremony, as well as festivity, was part of rural life in Rottingdean, like the Hollerin’ Pot on the last day of harvest, commemorated with a hay waggon decorated with bunting and corn dollies and drawn by the four best horses, Grandad sitting up front with a corn dolly on his hat to announce the end of the harvest with a rhyming “holler” outside all the pubs.
At the same time, however, throughout the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries a lot of wealthy people bought country piles in Rottingdean in order to enjoy rural peace and quiet away from their London homes but within convenient reach of Brighton, an entertainment centre. These included Kipling (who mentions a “young Copper” in Rewards and Fairies), William Nicholson, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and co, --there was, Jon says drily, “a whole Pre-Raphaelite thing going on there.” The second-homes and incomers phenomenon has intensified in the current age, and Rottingdean has become so posh and expensive that the Coppers and other local families have been priced out, which is why Jon and Jill now live in Peacehaven. Even in the thirties, however, it was very divided on the basis of class. Apart from the big houses for the London wealthy, the villagers sorted themselves into upstreeters and downstreeters on the high street that goes up into the Downs. Jill’s grandfather and great-grandfather were foremen (called bailiffs), so they had an end terrace in the more agrarian upstreet section, while some of the downstreeters lived almost in a slum, with a communal washhouse and so on, although this area also included the shopkeepers, baker, and publicans. There were four pubs as far back as Jill can remember, and the pubs and the church kept the community together: “they would go to church on Sunday and the rest of the time they would meet up in the pubs,” she explains.
During the agricultural period, the major exception to the village’s separation from the outside world --apart from the Traveller families who would turn up to help with seasonal farm work and were a major vehicle for folk song transmission-- were the sheep fairs, to which the shepherds would travel to sell sheep and, in the process, pick up new songs. Bob’s grandfather Brasser would walk eight miles to the Lewes sheep fair with his sheep (probably wearing one of the delightful smocks pictured in A Song for Every Season) and meet up with shepherds from Kent or Surrey, and once the day’s sheep-trading was over they would go to the pub, where Brasser would often hear a song that he liked but didn’t know already. So he would buy the bloke a pint of beer and ask him to sing it again, and then when they were going out he would give him a penny and ask him to sing it again around the back of the pub. After hearing it twice Brasser would have got the song, and walking back to Rottingdean he would sing it over and over again until it was permanently etched in his memory. The next time he went down to The Black Horse he’d say “Hey, I’ve got a new song!” and sing it to the others. Jill comments on how much better their memories must have been than ours today, in an age of Google and other technologies that we rely on to do the remembering for us, and Jon adds that this was probably because they were illiterate or semi-literate at best. Even those who had learned to read, such as Jill’s grandfather Jim Copper, picked up these memory techniques. Jim could remember until the day he died the exact dimensions of a traditional Sussex farm waggon’s components and recite them when challenged to do so by Bob: wheels, axles, shafts, everything. “They remembered because they had to,” says Jon.
However, the family also began early with the task of committing their repertoire to writing, apparently aware, as Jon puts it, that otherwise folk songs are “delicate things, birds of passage.” A generation after the encounter with Kate Lee, in 1922 Brasser was asked to write down some songs by the landowner’s daughter Mrs Corrie. At the time the songs were celebrated in the village, and she had heard and been charmed by them. Brasser had been to a dame school at a penny a time (after going to work at the age of eight) until he was fourteen or fifteen, so he was able to write out the songs very laboriously with phonetic spellings of words like ‘merrillee.’ It is clear that it was a huge effort, a real labour of love which took him a long time to complete: his handwriting was beautiful. Although Mrs Corrie seems to have kept the original, she had her posh London solicitor make stats of it on his copying machine, so the family still has a reproduction of Brasser’s book amongst its treasures.
Brasser’s son Jim seems to have been inspired by that story to write out his favourite songs in the 1930s for his children, Bob and Joyce, in a long thin account book which, as the farm’s foreman, he had lying around. Then he decided to make another book for his nephew Ron Copper, and later when he, Ron, Bob, and his brother John started doing BBC broadcasts he made what he called “the BBC book,” cutting “BBC” out of a newspaper headline and sticking it on the front of that particular account book. He seems to have copied the way that his father had done it, though it was easier for him since he had gone to school solidly until he was eleven. Jim’s collection contained not just traditional family songs but his other favourites as well, including music-hall material such as My Grandfather’s Clock. (Jim had spent some time in London, apparently working in a bakery, so he probably visited the music halls there, although he no doubt went to shows at the Brighton theatres as well. He had his father’s extraordinary memorising gift: he could go to a concert and hear a song like You Can’t Get Many Pimples on a Pound of Pickled Pork and be word- and note-perfect on it when he came home. The Copper Family don’t perform the music-hall songs often —as Jon puts it, they come and go—but Jill’s brother John is a great interpreter of them and always performs them with great gusto.) Later on Jon, who was a graphic designer, decided to design and print some proper songbooks, and he made six of them and distributed them amongst the family. They have now been commercially printed and are in their second edition.
In the 1930s Jim’s son Bob became extremely interested in other kinds of music as well, particularly American jazz and crooners. One day he was in Brighton when he visited a second-hand shop and bought a job lot of 78 rpm records on spec because there was a Louis Armstrong record on top of the pile. He took them back to Rottingdean and was playing them on his Columbia windup gramophone when he was stopped dead in his tracks by a Brunswick Black Label disc of Sleepy John Estes singing Drop Down Mama on one side and Married Woman Blues on the other. Even though farm workers in Rottingdean had it comparatively good until the Depression, Bob was overwhelmed by recognition of a common ground between the music of the Southern English rural working class and the Blues’ depictions of sharecroppers’ struggles, and he was smitten with traditional Black American music for the rest of his life. (The Coppers still treasure this record, of which Jon sent me a picture; it is pretty much worn out because Bob played it so often.) Fittingly, when Bob received a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Folk Awards in 2001 and the family performed Thousands or More, fellow guest Taj Mahal leapt onto the stage to contribute a fantastic vocal bass line. Bob shared his love of the Blues with John, Jon and Jill and his grandchildren at what he called ‘Blues-Ups’ at his cottage, playing selections from his favourites Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Lightning Hopkins, and many more. This passion of Bob’s was unknown to most on the folk scene, who knew him solely for the Copper family tradition, except for Ian Anderson (of the much-missed fRoots magazine), himself an accomplished blues musician. He persuaded Bob to record the EP Prostrate with Dismal: Bob Copper Sings the Blues alongside himself and Ben Mandelson. (‘Prostrate with dismal’ is a self-explanatory old Sussex expression used by Jim Copper.)
Some Americans seem to have experienced a similar flash of familiarity on hearing the Coppers, if their reception in the USA is any indication. I asked Jill and Jon why they think that the Coppers were so popular there, and Jon suggested that there is probably a lingering folk memory of the songs, particularly on the East Coast, where they are most popular. There are continuities in the New England Sacred Harp choral tradition but in addition, folk revival singers such as Louis Killen and Peter Bellamy helped to popularise the family’s repertoire on tours of the United States during the 1960s. Bellamy especially was meticulous about attributing the songs’ provenance to the family, which probably laid the foundation for the Coppers’ later success there, further cemented by A Song for Every Season’s worldwide release in 1971. They were eventually asked to do a gig at the Library of Congress in 1994, the significance of which they didn’t quite understand when they agreed to it. The family were rather surprised to encounter a lot of senators there who were folk music fans, and many of the audience queued up to have Bob sign copies of his book. Further afield, they gave concerts in Canada as well, in St. John’s, Newfoundland and at the Lunenburg Folk Festival in Nova Scotia, where they were struck by the utter normality of folk music in the province —all the little kids playing fiddle music.
Although the Coppers were known to folk-song collectors in the early twentieth century, this prominence came only in the postwar period. By the late 1930s, English folk music was seen as so old-fashioned that the family repertoire was in danger of dying out completely. Bob and his cousin Ron vowed to keep it going, so when they were coming home from a darts match with a crowd of friends on the bus, he and Ron would break into Come Write Me Down or something similar, only to be shouted down by the others: “we don’t want to hear that old stuff, let’s sing She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain instead!” As none of the music had yet been put on records, Bob --described by Jill as “a wise old bird who understood the songs’ cultural value”-- started taking Ron for private walks over the Sussex hills, where they ran no risk of annoying anyone, and they reminded each other of the songs as they went. That was the only way, at the time, to keep the material alive. The local unpopularity of the songs in the thirties may be connected to the contemporary breakdown of the agricultural economy that they celebrate, when the Rottingdean farms had to be sold off. Farming by the 1920s was on a losing streak due to the introduction of mechanisation: there were a lot of derelict farms in East Sussex, many people lost their jobs, and overall the changes were dramatic. Jim Copper had to switch from being the farm foreman to delivering newspapers for a while, and was then rescued by the government’s massive Great Depression works project to shore up the white chalk cliffs from Brighton to Rottingdean, during which he rose to become a foreman again. Nevertheless, a large number of local men remained out of work, since the majority population in Rottingdean had been connected with the farm, which employed about sixty men and boys up until the late twenties. Bob himself had to find a totally different sort of career, so he joined the Life Guards in London as a young man, and later became a rural policeman. Under these circumstances, Bob’s deliberate nurturing of the family repertoire shows that it was very close to his heart.
The Coppers’ rediscovery in the 1950s occurred thanks to an amusing incident in 1949. The BBC Home Service had a programme called Country Magazine, which had about seventeen million listeners and dated from before the Second World War. It was on every Sunday afternoon after lunch and featured talks about country life and agriculture. Every week there was a folk song performed by an operatically-trained singer, often Robert Irwin, whom Jim and Bob would get to know well. One Sunday he sang a Copper song, which Jim heard. He then got on the bus and went up to see Bob at the social club that the latter ran in Peacehaven (still in the family, a bit like a pub, but members-only) to find out whether he had heard Country Magazine. Bob had been too busy, but was curious to know what sort of a job they had made of the family song. "Bloody awful!” said Jim. "Some bloke with a posh voice, tinklin’ away at the piano. I’ve a good mind to tell him to ---, while I think of it.” Bob, ever the diplomat, said “Don’t do that, Dad. Why don’t you write and say how much you enjoyed it, and that they might like to know that we have that song in our family collection, and alongside that we have many more." Francis Collinson, a big name in musical theatre and a close friend of Noel Coward’s but also very interested in folk music, saw Jim’s letter and immediately sent a telegram saying that he would be down on Friday to meet them in Rottingdean. (When Collinson appeared he said “I know your name! Your father and brother were recorded by Mrs Kate Lee in 1896 and were made honorary members of the Folk Song Society!” Jim, much astonished, said “Were they?” --Brasser and Thomas had apparently been so busy farming that they had forgotten all about it.)
So that was how it all started. Country Magazine kept the opera singers but followed their performances with country singers, Bob and Jim to start with, singing the same song but in the vernacular style. Bob was subsequently employed by the BBC to collect the folk songs that had previously been thought extinct in England (in contrast to Scotland and Ireland). He was sent on this mission by the Irish BBC producer Brian George to attempt to do for England what had been done for Ireland in the forties. In the process Bob found numbers of pockets of folk songs in his collecting area --Sussex and Hampshire-- and made some fantastic discoveries, all recorded from older people. As a rural person himself, he was a highly successful collector because he was able to talk to elderly country people on their own terms.
Even though Bob sounds very laidback on the LP A Song for Every Season when he mentions their 1952 Royal Albert Hall performance as part of an international folk festival, Jill remembers this as a great occasion in the family, and one which overwhelmed at least one of them. Bob had lived in London when he was in the Life Guards but the rest of the family singing group had hardly travelled at all, so that for some of them going up to London for the performance was, as Jill puts it, like “going to a sheep fair a million times over” on the excitement scale. Naturally, once they got there they all went to the bar to have a drink, and Jill’s Great-Uncle John tucked into the beer and then disappeared. Later someone from the administrative staff took Bob to find John lying on his back on the hallway carpet singing Copper songs. Although he had probably not had more than two pints, the significance of the event had evidently been too much for him. So they picked John up and hauled him onto the stage, where they thankfully only had to do two songs, which they sang out of the account books that they had brought with them: they certainly hadn’t been prepared for the size of the audience. A London newspaper review afterwards commented that they had been “the surprise of the evening, appearing as they did in their workaday clothes,” at which Jim was most indignant. (They had in fact put on their best Sunday suits, complete with buttonholes.) Although Bob took this episode very much in professional stride, he did sometimes get excited about their success. Jill recalls an incident during their ten years of touring America, when she and her father were walking over the Golden Gate Bridge and he grabbed hold of her and said, “Coo, those bloody ol’ songs take us places, don’t they? Look where we are!”
There is no evidence of much reaction from others in the Rottingdean area to the Copper Family’s success: since most of them had a tradition of singing at the pub and the Coppers were just later in forgetting it, they were probably (if they noticed it at all) quite pleased when the BBC aired a docudrama about Jim’s life in the 1950s, for example. Although by that point Bob was no longer living in the village and much of the old agrarian community was gone, when he was growing up he had worked at the Rottingdean barber shop, so he was known and liked by everyone who remained. It was probably a bit disconcerting to them when BBC crews started showing up -- to the villagers London was “like another planet,” so that Londoners appearing was always a bit of a shock-- but in any case, much of the recording was done in the Peacehaven social club. By 1971, when a documentary about Bob was filmed around Rottingdean, the population had almost completely turned over so that it was not the old community at all any more. Ron still kept the Queen Victoria pub and sang with Bob, but that was the family’s last direct connection with the village.
Despite the muted response from Rottingdean, their fame did make them the target of some surrealist rustic humour from Norfolk in the shape of the parody tribute act the Kipper Family. (When I ask Jon and Jill for their comment on this strange episode, they both laugh uproariously.) Peter Bellamy acted as a go-between while the Kippers were developing their act, and Chris Sugden, one half of the Kippers, wrote to Bob, outlined their plan and clarified that they did not mean any disrespect by it. Bob responded that of course it was fine, since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The Coppers and Kippers once shared a stage in Brighton, which Jon recalls as a hilarious experience: Chris Sugden was an extremely lively and funny man, while Dick Nudds never came out of character as a taciturn ol’ kiddy who says absolutely nothing. They performed from an account book, a dig at the Coppers’ Royal Albert Hall performance, but in their case it contained nothing but blank pages.
Many professional singers have covered the songs seriously, however, including the Watersons, Steeleye Span, and many others. Although these interpretations often diverge significantly from the originals, the family have always simply been happy that the songs are being sung (apart from Jim’s annoyance at the BBC’s operatic versions), because that’s what they are for. The only thing that sometimes disturbs them slightly is the question of attribution --younger generation singers occasionally say that they learnt the song from a revivalist singer’s album or something similar, without realising that the material was originally collected from the Coppers, Harry Cox, Sam Larner, or another old traditional singer. However, nine times out of ten, people do attribute the material correctly.
The family do not view their work as performance, in contrast to professional folk singing. There is a significant difference between how the Coppers treat the songs and what pros do with them, which is that when trained musicians record traditional songs, the (often numerous) eccentricities of the original melodies are sometimes smoothened out and more modern rhythms are introduced, with the result that some historical detail is lost. One important point that Jon notes about field recordings of older country singers is that, although their renditions do not capture how the songs were sung even further back, they consistently have an unselfconscious and uninhibited nature that modern professional singers struggle to emulate. Jill adds that the family have consistently performed the songs in the same way through the generations. In the fifties a family friend warned Bob, who at the time was messing about on guitar and singing songs like The Big Rock Candy Mountain to the children, never to change the family songs but to keep them in their authentic state, because there would clearly be lots of people much better than Bob at coming up with new arrangements. They have indeed kept to this. At a gig in the Midlands someone once played a mashup that he had made of three successive Copper generations, each singing a different verse of one song, and the effect was seamless. Although the voices were different, the technique, intonation, and emphases were identical. This surprised Jill very much, who up until that point had not realised that each generation had followed the tradition to a T. I point out that this is the astounding thing about the Passing Out album, recorded by the Young Coppers in 2008, and they tell me an amusing story about how two of the lads on that record had taken some cassettes that Bob and Ron had made of their singing on a house renovation job in France, which Jon found somewhat bizarre. (They also took their toad-in-the-hole table with them, perhaps in order to introduce the Sussex pub game to the French, whom they no doubt further baffled with their Copper song performances.) One of their grandson’s friends has recently latched onto the family repertoire and loves these “weirdo songs”: at a local open mic night recently, the two of them got up and sang three Copper songs off their iPads, and to Jill’s astonishment, far from being asked to leave they have been invited back to do it again. Jill is clearly thrilled by this development.
It would also have warmed the cockles of Bob’s heart, whose dearest wish was to see this heritage passed on into the future. When Bob was thirteen, in 1928, he wondered whether he would live to see the new millennium, and to sing the Copper songs with his grandchildren, both of which came to pass. In the seventies the family lived all clustered together in Peacehaven, and one Christmas John, Jon and Jill’s six children pretended that they were going clubbing in Brighton, but in fact they nipped out of the house, had a quick practice, and then came back in to surprise Bob with their knowledge of the songs. By the time they had finished singing at him, there were tears of joy streaming down his face. When he died in 2004 at the age of eighty-nine, he did so comforted by the awareness that his descendants were keeping the family songs alive.
The interview fittingly concluded with this touching anecdote, which in its way sums up the entire Copper story. As Jon joked at one point in our conversation, “The beauty of it is that there’s never been any money in it!” Instead, the Copper family’s singing career has run on love, for the beauty of these extraordinary songs but even more --it seems-- for each other. In particular, continuing the tradition expresses their deep affection for Bob, universally known as a kind, patient, and good-humoured man, a friend to all the family. When they sing the songs they feel a nostalgic connection to him, while the repertoire also gives Jill the sense that she knows Brasser, even though she never met him. Among the many uses of this unique family tradition, this ability to hold on to one another through music is perhaps the most important. --Isabel Taylor
