A Song for Every Season

A Song For Every Season, Bob Copper's memoir of life at Rottingdean, won the 1971 Robert Pitman Literary Prize. Bob Copper, who has died aged 89, was regarded as the patriarch of English folk song; he had proudly inherited a family legacy of traditional singing that could be traced back hundreds of years, and he continued it with such love and gusto that Copper family songs have sustained the folk music scene ever since. In return he was revered by a folk movement strongly influenced by the family's unaccompanied close harmony singing. Yet while he was known primarily for his folk singing - and he continued to sing with his customary ebullience into his final years - he was also a regular broadcaster and a respected author of books about rural Sussex life.