Book for Trad Night: Andy Turner, 2 December
My interest in folk music was sparked by seeing Steeleye Span miming on Top of the Pops when I was 15. A few days later my best friend Mike lent me his Dad’s copy of Below the Salt, an earlier, less poppy Steeleye LP, and I was hooked. Mike and I started singing together in harmony – Steeleye material at first then, a bit later, songs learned from the Watersons. Then Mike’s Mum found a Copper Family LP in a local record shop, and bought it for his birthday. She knew nothing about the Coppers, and even in 1976, when record shops were plentiful, the chances of one stocking a Copper Family record were pretty slim, so this was serendipitous indeed. Within a few weeks we’d learned every song on the album – one of which, of course, was Spencer the Rover. We sang it together, and if we could find a third person to sing with, we’d get them to sing Jill Copper’s harmony, with its unexpected major sevenths in every other verse.
Transcription of the song: Ralph Vaughan Williams MSS Collection RVW2/3/42 archives.vwml.org/records/RVW2/3/42
Mike and I carried on singing together through university but, although we remained close friends, after that we went our separate ways. ‘Spencer’ became one of those songs I’d sing around the house, but didn’t ever perform in public. That changed at some point in the 1990s, when I discovered the version which Ralph Vaughan Williams had collected in my home county of Kent, on New Year’s Eve 1904. I suspect it was George Frampton who – knowing of my interest in songs and singers from Kent – tipped me off that RVW had noted a handful of songs from a “Mr. and Mrs. Truell” in Gravesend. I duly went up to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library to check them out and make copies of the songs. In those days Vaughan Williams’ manuscripts were held on user-unfriendly microfiche; thank goodness for the Take Six and Full English projects which made wonderful resources like these freely accessible to everyone! Initially I wasn’t sure about the rather crooked tune for this song, but after a while I started to warm to it – especially when I discovered that it fitted very nicely on my anglo-concertina – and it has remained part of my repertoire ever since.
Hear a recording of Andy singing Spencer the Rover
As was often the case when Vaughan Williams knew that a song’s words could be found elsewhere (on a printed broadside, for instance), he didn’t waste time writing down the lyrics when out “in the field”. It’s a shame, of course, that we don’t know exactly what words his source singers sang, but in this case I viewed it as a blessing in disguise – it meant I didn’t have to try to decipher RVW’s notoriously illegible handwriting, and also that I could carry on singing the Copper Family’s words, which I knew and loved so well.
Vaughan Williams noted the singers’ surname as ‘Truell’. It was more usually spelled ‘Trull’, although in my researches for the Kent Trad website I also found it rendered as ‘Trowell’ and ‘Troull’. John Trull, an agricultural labourer, had been born in 1829 in the village of Sutton-At-Hone, south of Dartford (these days, just outside the M25). Sarah, née Townsden, was born the same year at Cliffe At Hoo, on the Hoo peninsula, north of Rochester. She was a widow when she married John in March 1860. By the turn of the century they had moved away from the countryside to Gravesend. John died at the age of 74 in the Union Workhouse Infirmary in Gravesend in March 1908. Sarah survived him by three years – long enough to be an early recipient of the old age pension.
As for the song, it’s not perhaps a work of great literary merit; yet who can resist the depiction of Spencer’s children “with their prittle-prattling stories”. And maybe it’s not especially profound – the line “He had been so reduced, which caused great confusion” rather glosses over the fact that his economic woes were clearly so severe that he felt compelled to leave his wife and children behind (with all of the mental anguish this would entail). But, as an eternal optimist, I like the hopeful ending where, reunited with his beloved family, life seems worth living once more and, literally or metaphorically, there are “roses growing all around the door."
Andy Turner performs in our Trad Night series at Cecil Sharp House on Wednesday 2 December.
