Paul Carter, 1932–2012
As an 18 year old, Paul Carter worked on the door of Mick Mulligan’s jazz club in North Cheam. By the late 1950s he had developed an interest in folk song as well as jazz and, with Scotsman Bruce Dunnet (a follower of Ewan MacColl), was running a folk club, Folksong Unlimited, in a central London pub. Having worked for a while in Collector Records, a record shop in Charing Cross Road, he progressed to supervising recordings for the shop’s associated record label. Collector Records specialised in jazz, folk and blues, and put out just a few records each year. Between 1959 and 1964 Carter was involved in recording EPs by traditional Irish and Scots singers such as Joe Heaney and Jeannie Robertson, as well as figures from the folk revival, including Robin Hall, A.L. Lloyd, Shirley Collins, and Bob Davenport and The Rakes, in what was their first ever collaboration. In 1960 Reg Hall of The Rakes (and an important figure in the “discovery” and exposure of rural singers and musicians such as Scan Tester in Sussex, and Walter and Daisy Bulwer in Norfolk) took Carter to a music and song session in Sussex. These sessions, organised by Mervyn Plunkett, but with a major input from Reg Hall, were regular events at the time. Subsequently recordings made by Plunkett were edited by Carter for a Collector EP titled 4 Sussex Singers (Collector Records, JEB 7, March 1961). One of those singers was George Spicer, singing ‘I Wish There Were No Prisons’.
Soon he was also making recordings on behalf of Topic Records. It was Ken Stubbs who initially located and recorded a Romany gypsy family, the Willetts, and brought them to the attention of Topic. They sent Bill Leader and Paul Carter (who had access to better recording equipment than Stubbs) to record them on a caravan site near Ashford in Middlesex, in late 1961. These recordings, of Tom Willett and his sons Chris and Ben, were made available on the Topic LP The Roving Journeymen (12T84, 1962) – a landmark album, as it was the first long-playing record ever released of English traditional singers.
In the autumn of 1962 he went out in company with Ken Stubbs and Steve Pennells, looking for Gypsy singers or musicians to record. The following accounts are reproduced from Philip Heath-Coleman’s notes to the CD Boshamengro (Musical Traditions, MTCD373, 2017):
On Sunday 7 October 1962 Henry Lee – as he is generally remembered by his family and other travellers – was encamped at a favourite stopping place on Marden Plain, near Paddock Wood in Kent, as was his wont at hopping time, as much, apparently, for the occasion as for the work. With him in two unassuming caravans were members of his extended family, including grandchildren and his father-in-law Albert ‘Bullbred’ Smith: some of them at least are said to have travelled from Essex for the season. Returning home at closing time that Sunday afternoon, the men had settled down around the fire with a cup of tea, and Harry may already have taken out his fiddle to entertain the assembled company.
[…]
It was in search of Romany musicians that the collector Ken Stubbs and fiddler Steve Pennells had visited nearby Horsmonden that same Sunday, accompanied by Paul Carter who was there on behalf of Topic Records at Ken Stubbs’s invitation to record any music they found. On another day they might have run into the singers and musicians Minty, Jasper and Levi Smith, cousins of Harry’s wife Sarah Ann – usually known as Sary Ann – or possibly Minty’s husband, the fiddler Frank Smith.
The travellers would usually be in the area for a month or so around the Horse Fair which was held at Horsmonden on the second Sunday in September, to coincide with the hopping season. On the occasion in question Ken and Steve had failed to find any musicians at Horsmonden, but another traveller suggested that they should visit Harry Lee, who was encamped nearby, and persuaded his teenaged son to show them the way.
Carter was able to record 17 tracks in total of Harry Lee playing tunes on the fiddle. Two of these were included on the 1974 Topic LP, Boscastle Breakdown (12T240), and all of the recordings can be found 0n the Musical Traditions CD Boshamengro. Harry Lee is the only Romany fiddler of whom any significant number of recordings exists.
With his wife Angela – also a keen folk singer and musician, and later to become an acclaimed novelist – Paul Carter moved to Bristol and took up a teaching post at the Technical College. He continued to do work for both Collector and Topic – the latter paid him a modest stipend, and he would edit tapes for Topic in his front room. The Carters also started up and ran a couple of folk clubs in Bristol. The second of these, the Folk Song and Ballads club at the Lansdown, pursued a definite policy of favouring traditional songs performed in a traditional manner.
Paul had heard Phoebe Smith sing at Cecil Sharp House in London, and “felt she should be represented in the Topic catalogue. I knew that Frank Purslow knew her quite well and was familiar with her repertoire, so an arrangement was made for Frank and I to visit her. I picked up Frank from Bampton. Frank had decided what Phoebe should be asked to sing. We went to Woodbridge the next day. I was there to press the buttons on my Uher portable, and that’s about all. I’ve no recollection of the visit, but there were things on my mind at the time. It turned out that I had picked up the wrong tape boxes, and what I had was not virgin tape but stuff for recycling. So although these songs played fine on my Uher and on the bigger machine I used for editing, when they got to London the previous recording on them showed through”.1
This was in early 1969. Topic decided that the recordings were unusable, so Carter and Purslow went back to Suffolk to record Phoebe again. These recordings were released on Once I Had a True Love, (Topic Records, 12T193, 1970). The LP met a decidedly unfavourable reception in some quarters, with the result that Carter asked Topic to remove his name from the credits. His marriage to Angela Carter had broken down by this point (they divorced in 1972) and Once I Had a True Love appears to have been the last work he did for Topic, or any other recording company. He did however return to taking part in traditional singing events in the years before his death in 2012.
- Paul Carter, quoted in Mike Butler, Sounding the Century: Bill Leader & Co. Vol. 3, Troubador, 2023, p172-173 ↩︎
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