Following on from the recent death of retired horseman and consummate entertainer Ray Hubbard, it seems apposite to review the CD which was made of his music by John Howson and released by Veteran (1) in 2007, a wonderful selection of the songs, tunes, tales and jokes which made him such a beloved performer for so many years.
Ray was born in 1933 in Langmere, a hamlet of Dickleburgh in south Norfolk. Aside from music, his main love was working with horses, and he spent most of his life doing so, following a family tradition, as he commented: “You can trace my family working with horses back to the 1700s.” (2) He started working with horses alongside farmer Albert Saunders at Langmere Hall Farm when he was eight and a half, on being taken on for a Saturday job. “I used to lead in the harvest field and take the wagons home when I was just nine or ten; we’d work late into the night if there was light. I’d lead the middle wagon when it was dusk, the farmer would be in front with one wagon, the horseman would be behind me with the last one. We always used three.” Once he had finished school, Ray was taken on full-time at the farm, becoming head horseman at 17 and then took over the running of the farm at 21. He continued in this capacity until 1966, and the advent of mechanisation, when he retired from the farm and spent the rest of his working life in the building trade.
At home, Ray was born into a house with music. Both parents played the mouth organ, his father playing accordion and mandolin too. Other family members were musical and the youthful Ray seems to have soaked it all up. After his marriage to Pamela in 1954, the couple started a concert party called “Norfolk Bred”. This was a variety show with a changing cast and a wide variety of acts, and was busy for a great many years. In addition, Ray was organist for Rushall church and would also play regularly in pubs in the area around Dickleburgh. More recently, Ray was a regular attender – the life and soul to a great extent perhaps – at many local events dedicated to local traditional music, where his contribution will certainly not be forgotten.
In 2006 and 2007, John Howson recorded Ray for his Veteran label. Some tracks were recorded live at Stradbroke Queen’s Head on 26th October 2006, and the rest was recorded at Ray’s home in Diss in 2007. Taken all together, they present a wonderful selection of his music making that was the staple repertoire at the time of recording. There is a wide variety of songs, the majority of them comic, such as The Muck Spreader, Over the Garden Wall and Sarah. Almost all are of relatively recent vintage and with known composers, rather than traditional fare, a good example being Has Ya
Fa’r Got a Dickey, Bor? by Allan Smethurst. (3) Ray seems to have picked his material up from a wide variety of sources: fellow concert party members (Over the Garden Wall), and the East Anglian magazine (You Can’t Tell Them Nothing,They Know) for example. An unusual item is Good King George the Farmer, published in 1929 in Five Songs from Essex, although that may not have been Ray’s source. In all, it’s a selection for entertainment, mostly light and comic in a very memorable way. Whatever the provenance, Ray sings them with a surety born of the experience of having performed them in front of audiences for years before the recording. Equally comfortable are the tunes played on melodeon, a medley of waltzes and the East Anglian perennial favourites Oh, Joe, the Boat is Going Over, Heel and Toe Polka and Waltz for the Veleta. Sprinkled amongst all of this are a couple of recitations, comments and the hilarious set of jokes presented as “My Life Story”. This last still makes me laugh out loud, even though I’ve heard the material countless times. All delivered in Ray’s rich Norfolk brogue, it’s a great evocation of times gone by but also, by virtue of its sturdy existence, equally relevant to the present day. After all, who could fail to be moved to grin, if not actually laugh, at Ray’s sly, witty and sometimes self-deprecating humour, as presented here, no matter how far removed from the social circumstances which nurtured it?
In all, this is a wonderful recording in its entirety. A historical document in that it preserves a portion of home-spun entertainment, by an exemplary practitioner, from a time when such music-making was commonplace, but it’s much more than that – I highly entertaining record and a valuable addition to the considerable accumulation of recordings of traditional East Anglian traditional music making. It stands as a fitting testament to a much-loved and greatly-missed entertainer. Furthermore, it has to be mentioned that the sound quality is excellent and the CD is housed in handsome packaging, including a 14 page booklet with much information about Ray’s life and the tracks, as well as many photographs. It is highly recommended.
Chris Holderness April 2025
Notes
- Veteran VT155CD, released in 2007. Now available only as a download. veteran.co.uk
- Eastern Daily Press, 17 September, 2022.
- “The Singing Postman”.