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A-Swinging Down the Lane/Adieu to Old England The Willett Family. 2 x CD + 32pp. booklet. Forest Tracks FT2CD KS1, 2013. £15.00. <www.forest-tracks.co.uk>
Adieu to Old England The Willett Family. 2 x CD + 29 pp. booklet. Musical Traditions MTCD361-2, 2013. £16.00. <www.mustrad.org.uk>
When Topic Records released the Roving Journeyman LP in 1963, it was something of a milestone since it was the label's first full-length album of field recordings of traditional English singers. Those recordings, featuring 84-year-old Gypsy singer Tom Willett, along with his sons Chris and Ben, had been made specifically for Topic by Paul Carter and Bill Leader. But they were following up on a lead provided to them by Ken Stubbs, who had visited and recorded the family two or three times in the early 1960s. In recent years, the LP has been made available as a digital download, while some of Peter Kennedy's 1963 recordings of Tom and Chris are included on Topic's I'm a Romany Rai. Mike Yates's 1970s recordings of Chris Willett have also been included on releases by Topic and Musical Traditions. Until now, however, none of Ken Stubbs's field recordings of the Willetts has been put into the public domain.
Bizarrely, these two double CD sets, containing more or less identical recordings, were released within weeks of each other in 2013. This was not the result of some ill-conceived commercial clash between rival publishers, but simply the result of Paul Marsh of Forest Tracks and Rod Stradling of Musical Traditions having worked independently, in ignorance of each other's plans. The Musical Traditions recordings came via Jim Ward, whom Stubbs had allowed, as long ago as 1973, to copy all of his recordings, with permission to have them released in...