Oooh goodee! Great debate which as usual poses as many questions as it answers.

The only part I am vaguely qualified to take part in is the bit which impinges upon the Copper Family repertoire. It's absolutely true as Bill Cameron reports that by examining repertoire of traditional singers rather than published collections of song the picture is interesting. Peter Bellamy latched onto the fact that we had these 'innocent hares', 'sweet primeroses' and 'daffadowndillys' and loved it! I believe that he too had to defend the Copper repertoire against those who thought it too good to be true.

In the early days of the 'revival' Bob was more than once challenged over the vaildity of the repertoire. His answer is one of absolute truth, but may be unpalateable to some. Rottingdean was essentially an agrarian community and had been up until after the Great War; its populace comprised agricultural labourers and their families amongst others. There was but one main employer, the local landowner, and in the case of Rottingdean, a benign one, a Quaker family the Beards. They provided work under what for the time were quite extraordinary conditions - workers were kept employed throughout the winter months without the more commonplace lay-offs suffered elsewhere. There was, to our way of thinking a patronising 'lady bountiful' distribution of clothing and blankets to the needier folk and use of farm acres for growing produce for home consumption. But in the terms of the time in which they lived these people felt themselves well treated. These were not the conditions in which the seeds of revolution would be sown. This was not a place where songs reflecting a dissatisfaction with life in general would be found.

As Bob has said (and I paraphrase) "there was always a man ready to put a Cowslip through his buttonhole, cock his cap to the world and sing a song in praise of the country life and work he loved".

The Coppers repertoire was not born of the grinding poverty found in both agrarian and industrial communities in other parts of Britain. It had an entirely different background. The singers were poor but they weren't starving, and people like Bob's grandfather Brasser and his father Jim always looked on the bright side of life. In their songs they found, as Bob has written, their drama, their poetry, their music and their philosophy. Snuggled in that safe little part of Southern England, enjoying a (for England) temperate climate, hard but regular work and a roof over their heads no wonder they sang as they did.

Theirs were not the songs of right or left. More a representation or snapshot of what a group of working class Englishmen felt truly represented their particular lot in their particular time - whatever we may think about it.

Even the one song of dissent, "Hard times of old England" ends with a typically optomistic note.