Harry Cox

From his discovery in 1945 by folk song collector, E. J. Moeran until shortly before his death, Harry Cox was England’s most frequently recorded country singer and the source from whom many modern urban folk revival and folk-rock groups learned their songs.

Harry Cox’s extensive folk-song repertoire was regarded by collectors as exceptional. Before World War II, art composers and musicians interested in folk song, like Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, and E. J. Moeran, were discovering a fast-fading number of country singers who remembered only a couple of songs they sang at the annual Harvest Home suppers. They may have known more but were possibly reluctant to sing someone else’s — old so-and-so’s song. Also, the time-consuming process of transcribing words and tunes on to paper interrupted the singers’ progression from one song to another.

One collector — one only — early in the twentieth century, way ahead of his time, decided to use the Edison Bell Phonograph, employing wax cylinders. This was Percy Grainger. Not only did he want to get all the idiosyncrasies of the music, the use of non-tempered scales, the subtle changes of rhythm, the holding or shortening of beat notes, the drops and raises, but, in addition, he wanted to capture all the nuances of the local dialect. Grainger made his recordings around the market town of Brigg in Lincolnshire, the next county north of Norfolk, and, as he would have been in Norfolk, he was fascinated by the way the singers extended their regional speech patterns within the musical framework. 

(Excerpt from Peter Kennedy's notes to the album "What Will Become of England")