Harry Cox: English Folk Singer and Sings English Love Songs
(EFDSS LP1004 and DTS LFX 4)

Two for the price of one this month, as up for scrutiny are a brace of Harry Cox albums, both released in 1965, and which cemented his reputation as one of England’s finest traditional singers. A great deal has been written about him and his singing community and I don’t propose to duplicate that here. The reader is referred to the booklet notes of the Topic Records double CD The Bonny Labouring Boy (1), Chris Heppa’s published research (2) and several articles produced for the East Anglian Traditional Music Trust (3) as a starting point. Rather, I’d like to put into the spotlight a pair of records which were released – in Britain – within a few months of each other and which gave a fair aural portrait of Harry’s repertoire, and something of the context, at a time when there were precious few LPs available of traditional English singers.

Prior to these releases there was little indeed. The first LP of a traditional English singer seems to be the American release of Sam Larner: Now is the Time for Fishing on the Folkways label (1961) (4). In Britain, Topic dipped their toe in the water with The Willett Family: The Roving Journeyman in 1962 (5) and the English Folk Dance and Song Society followed with Bob and Ron Copper: Traditional Songs from Rottingdean in 1964. (6) Harry’s singing had been heard across several volumes of the Caedmon series The Folk Songs of Britain (1961) (7) and on one track of an EP: The Barley Mow in 1960. (8) Then followed the two discs in question – quite an exposure for one singer, given the general paucity of such material at the time.

Peter Kennedy recorded Harry extensively for the BBC between 1953 and 1965. It is a selection of that material which appears on these LPs. Harry Cox: English Folk Singer was first released by EFDSS, to members only, in 1965, “as a tribute to a great English folk-singer in the year of his 80th birthday” (9) and was later released more generally as part of their “Folk Classics” series. (10) The first side kicks off with the local tale, the Barton Broad Ballad, in which local lads fell foul of a farmer whilst babbing (11) for eels, only to have the farmer get his comeuppance in court. What follows is a well-chosen programme: the murderous tale of The ‘Prentice Boy, with its wonderful irregular rhythm, the nautical old chestnut Windy Old Weather, a perennial favourite in East Anglia, the tale of highway robbery and a sticky end in Newlyn Town and the epic Napoleonic The Bonny Bunch of Roses. These last two in particular demonstrate well Harry’s consummate dispassionate delivery, allowing the story to take its course. A short hard-luck tale, Adieu to Old England and the story of thwarted lust and a supposedly happy ending, Blackberry Fold, end the side – a wonderful
collection of characters woven through these tales, with Harry’s delivery allowing it all to unfold each time.

Peter Kennedy evidently found it necessary to explain Harry’s style and delivery, to fellow EFDSS members, in the sleeve notes: “At first hearing of Harry Cox you may remark on the ‘dry’ impersonality and monotony of his style; for many of us in the Society it has taken five, ten or even twenty years to appreciate the subtleties of his performances. How impressed you may be, at first, with the tricks and dramatic effects of a concert singer of folk songs, but how soon tire of repeat performances! With a traditional singer of Harry Cox’s calibre the process is reversed. Each time you hear him the songs grow on you, for he presents them with complete selflessness and sincerity. To watch him, with his eyes closed or looking
into the distance beyond the company, you realise that he is living the story of each song. Contrary to what so many have said of traditional singers he is, in fact, giving an artistic performance into which he pours as much, if not more nervous energy than the best stage singers. Each song is imbued, however, with the same dry cynicism as when he tells a story or speaks about his family background and hard-working country life…” Well said! It is indeed the case and makes for rewarding repeated listening.

Which brings us to the second side. This is more varied. Rather in the style of the aforementioned ground-breaking LP Sam Larner: Now is the Time For Fishing, with its lengthy sections of talk, here we have songs mixed with Harry talking about himself, his father and also about singing and playing. There are also examples of his fiddle and melodeon playing, giving a rounded picture of the consummate rural entertainer. First there is the comic and cumulative Widdlecombe Fair, followed straight away by Harry playing the tune of The Ploughboy on the fiddle (a fairly rare example of an East Anglian musician playing an air on the fiddle, or any other instrument for that matter). The complaint of What Will Become of England? follows some talk, and then further talk is interspersed with instrumental tracks: a waltz on the melodeon, and then Yarmouth Hornpipe and Woodland
Flowers, also on that instrument, the latter of which Harry described as being for a schottische. Later we have two hornpipes on the fiddle: Yarmouth Hornpipe again (and interesting to note how different it is from the version on the melodeon) and Meg Merrilees – a rarity in East Anglia. (12) The snippets of Harry’s speech give a fascinating evocation of his life and family, and also just how much music he got from his father Bob, a man with a great local reputation as both singer and fiddler. The last three tracks are back to Harry’s songs, all with a theme of love or lust: The Foggy Dew, Nancy and Johnny and Firelock Stile, the last with its warning of the possible medical consequences of such carnal behaviour.

Harry Cox Sings English Love Songs, also released in 1965, on DTS Records, (13) presents another selection of Peter Kennedy recordings. The album was also released in the United States – before Britain, in 1964, if discographical information is to be believed – on the Folk-Legacy label. (14) Here we have purely songs, fourteen of them, with the loose theme of love – although lust, infidelity and comeuppance would be better descriptors for several of them. All good, wholesome stuff, of course, being folk songs. Harry works his way through the breezy Seventeen Come Sunday, the bucolic love story of The Spotted Cow and on to Next Monday Morning, with a young girl’s longing for matrimony. Things move into the more comic with the bawdy tale of The Greasy Cook, often titled Butter and Cheese and All. (15) Then the mutual love of Colin and Phoebe, even if she mistrusts his intentions at first, followed by the tale of a cuckolded sailor taking it out violently on his unfaithful wife in The Birmingham Man. The side ends with the classic theme of forbidden love across the class divide, this time with tragic consequences, with Betsy the Serving Maid.

The second side continues this theme: Bonny Labouring Boy considers the impossibility of such attraction, when social status was so rigid. A feisty young female disguises herself as a man and runs off to join the army in The Female Drummer, seemingly with no motive other than serving her country, in this version, only to be ‘discovered’ at the end of the song. And so the theme of the tribulations of love continues with The Squire and the Gypsy, of which the title says it all, and the popular comic old tale of Marrowbones, where a man gets his own back on his unfaithful wife. Next up is The Groggy Old Tailor, who gets his comeuppance rather violently at the hands of the “bold drover”, who wasn’t happy about what he was up to with his wife. We then conclude with the bawdy Up to the Rigs of London Town, in which a countryman gets the better of a prostitute, and finally the sustained double entendre of The German Musicianer, to end the LP on an appropriately light-hearted note. Quite a romp through a series of larger-than-life characters and situations, and yet somehow completely ordinary and earthy. It is very easy to sit back and get lost in their tales, which is precisely as it should be, of course.

Norwich singer Peter Coleman, who knew Harry Cox well, described him as a ‘colossus’, standing head and shoulders over all others. This may be a fair assessment but it should not be forgotten that Harry was the product of his community, one which happened to be very rich in traditional singers, as Chris Heppa’s research (16) has pointed out. Also, just as there is far more to country blues than just Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson, there were a great many significant tradition-bearers of English folk song. None were recorded as extensively as Harry though, and judging by this pair of LPs, it is not difficult to see why. His command of the material, obvious relish in the tales and awareness of the importance of what he was custodian of, make him a supremely important figure in English folk song. When these two LPs hit the shelves in 1965 they must have been a revelation. It is easy to see why they served as such an inspiration for so many others for such a long time.

It ought to be a reviewer’s job to point out faults and failings as well as the positives, but in this instance I have to admit to being at a loss. What is tragic is that these two LPs have been so unavailable for so long. Peter Kennedy did reissue both, in expanded forms, as cassettes and then CDs, on his Folktrax label, but these have not been in print for quite some time.
(17) The American, Folk-Legacy, version of Sings English Love Songs is now available as a CD from Smithsonian Folkways (18) but the EFDSS LP remains long out of print. With the current rebranding of that institution’s commercial face as Folk England, nothing could be more fitting from its back catalogue to illustrate exactly what such a new name should represent than this collection from Harry Cox.

Chris Holderness April 2026

Notes:

1. Harry Cox: The Bonny Labouring Boy Topic TSCD512D. Easily available and highly recommended as an extensive collection of Harry’s music.
2. Particularly: Chris Heppa: Harry Cox and His Friends: Song Transmission in an East Norfolk Singing Community, c1896-1960 A Life in Song: EFDSS Journal, Oct. 2001
3. Shirley Collins and Chris Heppa: Harry Cox in the ‘Portraits’ series; Chris Holderness: The Broads Brothers: Harry and Fred 2021
4. Sam Larner: Now is the Time For Fishing Folkways FG 3507 1961
5. The Willett Family: The Roving Journeyman Topic 12T84 1962
6. Bob and Ron Copper: Traditional Songs From Rottingdean EFDSS LP1002 1964
7. See the discography published on the EATMT site: Chris Holderness: When I Sing a Song, My Mind is On It: a Discography of Recordings of Harry Cox – Produced 50 Years After his Death. In retrospect, this could have given fuller details about the LPs in question, but
   otherwise is comprehensive
8. The Barley Mow (Songs From the Village Inn) His Master’s Voice 7EG 8288 1960
9. Harry Cox: English Folk Singer EFDSS LP1004 1965. The original release had a black and white photograph of Harry on the sleeve
10. I haven’t been able to find out a date of reissue. The catalogue number remained the same but the original sleeve was replaced with a painting by John Crane
11. The practice of fishing for eels without hooks – using a bundle of worms threaded on wool, attached to a line and pole.
12. For a discussion of Harry’s fiddle playing, see: Phil HeathColeman: Harry Cox: Norfolk Fiddler Extraordinaire Musical Traditions MT284 2013. This can be found at mustrad.mainlynorfolk.info Since Rod Stradling’s passing, the site was unavailable. It is now temporarily so as above, although searc facilities don’t lead to it. The site should be found a more permanent home before long. Also relevant is: Chris Holderness: The Devil’s Box in the East: Traditional Fiddle Playing in Norfolk and Suffolk – published on the EATMT site in Oct. 2024
13. DTS Records was an output of Davies Transcription Services, operated by recording engineer Sean Davies. He seems to have had connections with EFDSS and several recordings of folk music were issued on this small label
14. Harry Cox Sings English Love Songs Folk-Legacy FSE20 / FSB20
15. This has a different sleeve to the British release
16. See Sam Larner’s version on Folkways FG 3507, as (4) above
17. As (2) above
18. Details in the discography, as (7) above
19. It can be obtained from folkways.si.edu Incidentally, the service is impressive – upon ordering from them, the merchandise will be with you in about two working days, via FedEx, all the way from Washington DC!