Here is a text scan of the article on Walter Pardon by Mike Yates which appeared in Folk Roots in October 1985 (No.28). The second part of the article in this issue is the piece on The Knapton Drum & Fife Band and is exactly as linked to in my post of 07 Jan 20 - 10:44 AM so I have not scanned it here. The article mainly covers ground that has already been posted in this thread, but there some different thoughts and facts:-

CECIL SHARP, PROBABLY the finest twentieth century folk song collector, had pretty fixed ideas when it came to defining precisely just what constituted a folk song. Interestingly, when we look at Sharp's large collection we see that the bulk of his songs seem to stem from the world of the nineteenth century broadside printers, who flourished most strongly during the period 1815 to 1875. In other words, the songs which Sharp collected in the first and second decades of this century, and which he often considered to be quite old, were, in fact, only about fifty years old in the form that he was hearing them. Very often his singers would have been born during this broadside printing boom.
Walter Pardon was born in the year 1914, ten years before Sharp's death. He is undoubtedly the finest living English traditional folk singer, and possesses a voice and repertoire that would have warmed Sharp's heart. Not surprisingly most of his 150 or so songs came to him from his Uncle Billy Gee who was born in the mid 1860s.
Walter is from the tiny Norfolk village of Knapton and today lives in the same red brick cottage which had previously housed his parents and Uncle Billy. Hardly anyone outside of his immediate family knew that Walter was a singer until the early 1970s, when his nephew, Roger Dixon of Fakenham. heard him sing The Dark-Eyed Sailor at a Christmas party. Roger gave Walter a cassette recorder and asked him to record a few songs onto it. In the end the cassette, with about twenty songs safely committed to tape, was forwarded to Peter Bellamy. Peter's amazement on hearing the tape was well expressed in his notes to Walter's first album:
"The village of Knapton lies two miles inland from Mundesley, in the heart of the gentle north-east Norfolk landscape of field, pasture and woodland - the archetypal setting in which one might hope to find traces of tradition. Few people, however, would have dared to expect that in the 1970s even this ideal pastoral scene could yield a singer with the vocal abilities and richness of repertoire of Walter Pardon."
WHO INDEED COULD have expected a singer with classic ballads such as The Gypsy Laddie, The Broomfield Wager or Lord Lovel, stirring broadside ballads such as A Ship To Old England and Balaclava or fine lyrical pieces which include I Wish, I Wish and The Saucy Sailor?
"Billy had most of 'em", says Walter. "He worked on the golf course as a groundsman and when times were bad he'd be laid off. That would be in the 1920s. We'd sit of an afternoon in one of the sheds. He'd keep a bottle ofsomething or other under the floorboards and he'd get that out and we'd sit there, the two of us, him singing and me listening. And that's how I got most of my songs." Walter believes that Uncle Billy in his youth had sung in a number of pubs in North Walsham, especially in the Mitre Tavern, and that he had picked up most of the pieces during Saturday night singsongs.
Of course Walter had shown the ability to learn songs at an even earlier age. The following lines, originally from the pen of George Cooper, come from his days at the village primary school.

'"Come little leaves' said the wind one day.
'Come o'er the meadows with me and play.
Put on your dresses of red and gold,
Summer is gone and the days grow cold.'
As soon as the leaves heard the wind's loud call
Down they came fluttering one and all.
Over the brown fields they danced and flew
Singing the sweet little songs they knew."

WHEN HE WAS FOURTEEN Walter was apprenticed to a carpenter in the village of Paston and he remained in this part of Norfolk for most of his life. The only exception was during the war years when Walter was sent to Aldershot. He spent four years in the army and remembers, in 1944, hearing a radio performance of Harry Cox singing The Banks Of Sweet Dundee. "I never met Harry, though he was only born twelve miles away. Never met him. Never met Sam Lamer either." Walter, though, had previously heard of Harry Cox. In the mid 1930s one of the family had bought Harry's 78 rpm record of The Pretty Ploughboy/Down By The Riverside. This was at a time when Walter would cycle into North Walsham, or take the bus to Norwich, to order instrumental 78s by performer such as William Hannah or the Wyper Brothers. Even today Walter has a stack of 78s piled high in one of his bedrooms and he can still be coaxed into playing some of the tunes on his own melodeon.
Unlike Uncle Billy, Walter was never a pub singer. Indeed his only public singing was at family gatherings at Christmas. "I liked The Dark-Eyed Sailor. It seemed alright to me and nobody else wanted to sing it." Like many other gatherings of singers, each performer had his, or her, songs which nobody else would perform. Tom Gee would sing The Bonny Bunch Of Rosesor The Dandy Man, Bob Gee's song was Jones's Ale, while Walter's mother would sing Grace Darling, a song about the famous 1838 lifeboat rescue. "Father never was a singer. Nor his father either." According to Walter most of his generation had little time for the old songs. "They ridiculed the old men just tell 'em to shut up. And that's the truth."
SO WHY DID WALTER learn the songs? What made him different? Talking with Walter one gains the impression that Uncle Billy was the catalyst. They were clearly very close and Walter absorbed much of Billy's love for singing, together with the songs themselves, from hearing Billy sing. There was never any conscious effort made to learn the songs. Billy would not teach Walter line for line. It was rather like the old mountaineer's saying about climbing mountains. The songs, like the mountains, just happened to be there. It is also, I think, important to remember that the pace of life was somewhat different fifty years ago. I once asked Walter's cousin, Hubert Gee, what was the biggest change that he had witnessed during his life. As we looked across the meadows Hubert told me that he had never envisaged a world without horses. All the fields about us had been worked through the seasons with teams of shires. The lane that we were standing in had always been filled with the sounds of wheels and hooves. I think that to Hubert the horse represented a world that was steady and fixed in its pace. As he said, a man who walked behind a horse-drawn plough or harrow, day in and day out, must surely have had time to think. It's a sentiment that many traditional singers have expressed to me in one way or another. Nowadays we are all filled with a haste that leaves little time for contemplation.
In 1975 Bill Leader recorded and issued Walter Pardon's first album of songs. The following year Bert Lloyd invited Walter to join a group of British singers and musicians who had been invited to join in the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations in Washington, and Walter's second album appeared a year later. There were television and radio interviews and invitations to sing in various folk clubs and festivals. Over the years Walter has accepted his new found position with a quiet modesty and grace, and many a folk world self-publicist could learn a thing or two from him on this subject.
During the late 1970s I spent a considerable time with Walter, recording as many other songs as he could remember, and some of these recordings were issued on two further albums. His memory, at times, can prove to be quite amazing. One morning I mentioned the poaching song Thorneymoor Woodsto him. Walter had heard it sung years ago, but said that he had never learnt it. I left Walter at lunchtime to do some shopping and when I returned an hour or so later I saw that Walter had written out seven eight-line stanzas to the song, and that was a song that he had never learnt!
THE BULK OF Walter's songs are what Cecil Sharp would have called folk songs. There are also many late nineteenth and early twentieth century Music Hall items, mostly humorous songs such as Cock-a-Doodle-Do, Naughty Jemima Brown or Old Brown's Daughter which Walter sings so well. He has also been the source of a handful of rare songs which record the early activities of what is now the National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers.
Nowadays Walter tends to limit his public singing to the summer months. The winter cold is beginning to get to him and he does not like to return late at night to a cold cottage. If you have never heard Walter sing then look out for him. He is a rarity these days. He is also, to my way of thinking, a national treasure. Long may he continue to be so.