Charlie Bridger – Won’t you buy my pretty flowers?

I’ve posted several songs here which I learned from Charlie Bridger, from Stone-in-Oxney in Kent:

• Week 81 – Three Maidens a-Milking Did Go
• Week 82 – The Birds upon the Tree
• Week 110 – The Gipsy’s Warning
• Week 114 – The Jolly Waggoner
• Week 182 – Wait till the clouds roll by
• Week 232 – The Veteran

I recorded Charlie singing, and talking about both his working life and his involvement with music, back in April 1983. Around last Christmas-time Rod Stradling, editor of Musical Traditions, got in touch to say that he’d like to put these recordings out on a CD. I’d always intended to write up what I knew about Charlie – indeed I’d promised to do so for Keith Summers, the previous editor of Musical Traditions, when it was still a printed magazine. Having failed to publish anything in the intervening years, I’d decided it could wait till my retirement. But this seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. George Frampton, who had never met Charlie, but interviewed his widow Lily, and various other people who knew him, very generously sent me all of his notes, and copies of a number of photos. And I set about pulling together the information, and then writing up booklet notes for the CD.

Charlie Bridger, Won’t you buy my pretty flowers? (MTCD377) came out in July. It’s available for £12 from Musical Traditions records. The CD contains 29 tracks – all but 2 of the songs I recorded from Charlie, plus one track of him playing the clarinet. Here’s the tracklist, and you can also read the 28 page booklet on the MT site.

It’s had a couple of really nice reviews. And I’m particularly chuffed by the fact that these reviews were written by two people I admire greatly, song collector Mike Yates and former EFDSS librarian Malcolm Taylor.

I’m mentioning all of this now, because next weekend (5th-6th October) I’ll be at the Tenterden Folk Festival. I’ll be singing a number of the Kentish songs in my repertoire, and on the Sunday afternoon I’m giving a talk about Charlie Bridger. Vic and Tina Smith have kindly agreed to be on hand with their laptop, speaker and projector, so this will be an illustrated presentation; and it will include some recordings of Charlie singing, and clips of him talking – about farmwork, stonebreaking, tanner hops, busking, and the places where country people sang, some 80 or 90 years ago.

Here’s a sample, from the recording I made when I interviewed Charlie and Lily on 2nd July 1988. This is Charlie talking about smoking concerts.

 

Please note: this excerpt is from a copy of my original cassette recording. The songs included on the CD have all been professionally cleaned up to remove hiss and hum and so forth, so are of a much higher audio quality than this.