Bob Copper
Album: Prostrate With Dismal: Bob Copper Sings The Blues
Label: Ghosts From The Basement
Tracks: 5
Website: http://bobcopperblues.bandcamp.com/releases

Few aficionados of the English tradition would argue that the Coppers, of the picturesque East Sussex village of Rottingdean, are the archetypal English folk music family. They have a legacy of singing and preserving an often unique repertoire of traditional songs that stretches back several generations and continues to this day. If you've followed the Coppers, or even if you've expressed nothing more than a passing interest in them, it's likely that you've heard seemingly apocryphal tales Bob Copper and his lifelong fascination with pre-war American blues and jazz. It probably shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to learn that a singer of traditional English folk songs can also possess a passion for the traditions of other countries, but somehow the idea of old Bob grooving out to Son House and Robert Johnson was always positioned as being more than a little odd, as if our tradition bearers ought to retain a sense of perceived purity about their external influences and enthusiasms.

In fact, when he was still very much 'young Bob' the family's erstwhile patriarch was variously trekking off on a solo mission to see Louis Armstrong, tracking down what even then must have been a rare 78 of Sleepy John Estes and finding himself enthralled by field recordings of American negro singers. For Bob, a fascination with the music of the Mississippi Delta and an emersion in the songs of his family's past were far from mutually exclusive pursuits. He always felt there were tangible links between these traditions and whilst academics will doubtless debate this point ad nauseam he put it best himself when he claimed that both musics originated from "the same place in the soul".

It took him until his 85th birthday party to out himself as a blues singer in public and he made few recordings - the modest repertoire represented on this five track EP is the full extent of his recorded output in the genre. Three tracks feature the guitar and mandolin of Ian Anderson and Ben Mandelson and possess a swagger that's familiar from much of their previous work together, not least their recent False Beards project. There's very little that's melancholic about these tracks, despite what the EP title might suggest: Diving Duck and Brownsville No.2 more or less rollick along whilst Soul Of A Man features some typically spirited Copper Family chorus singing. The two entirely solo tracks, recorded at home and featuring Bob's rarely-heard concertina playing, may actually have more of the spirit of the old country blues about them. His take on Oscar Brown Jnr's Rags And Old Iron is suitably mournful whilst the solo Going Down To Brownsville is in somewhat stark contrast to the Anderson/Mandelson version heard earlier on the EP but recorded some time later.

Clocking in at around 18 minutes there's perhaps too little on this EP to give anything other than a snapshot of Bob's passion, but maybe that's appropriate. He'll always be best known for his family's legacy and within his recorded output this will remain little more than a curio. But, oh lawdy, what a doggone curio!

Kev Boyd