Phoebe Smith

Phoebe Smith née Scamp, 1913-2001

The Romany gypsy Phoebe Smith is widely regarded as one of the greatest English traditional singers to have been recorded. When recorded by folk song collectors, from the 1950s onwards, she was living with her husband Joe near Woodbridge in Suffolk. However she was born in Faversham, spent much of her early life in Kent, and acquired her repertoire of songs primarily from family members..

It is usually stated that she was born in Tanner Street (now Tanners Street), Faversham in 1913. Certainly her birth was registered in the first quarter of 1913, and she was baptised at Elmsted on 4th April 1913. In the 1939 Register her birth date is given as 7th March 1912, but 7th March 1913 is the more likely date – this was the date given when her death was registered in 2001. She was the youngest of 21 children born to Bill Scamp and his wife Ann, née Jones, originally from Crowborough in Sussex. Her parents had settled, and worked on fruit farms in East Kent, but would still travel around Kent and Essex for seasonal work, as Phoebe’s son Manny told Mike Yates:

I suppose life was like a holiday in those days: we would spend a couple of months here to work, then move on to another area for the next harvest, and we’d meet up with our aunties and uncles and cousins. It would be Essex, near Chelmsford for the sugarbeeting, Kent for the cherries, apples, plums and pears, then up to the Fens for the potatoes. That would be the times when the singing was practised. You’d be by yourself six or seven 1hours, no-one to please, no-one to offend, and an old uncle in the next orchard would shout over, ‘Have you heard this one?

When she was about four years old the family went to live in Herne Bay. They moved again, to Ramsgate, when she was about ten, and later to Ickham. No Scamps appear in Faversham or any of those other locations in the early 20th century census records, but there were numerous Scamps living in East Kent, often with occupations such as “horse dealer” which suggest that they might be of Romany stock (also “hawker”, “general dealer”, “vagrant” or, occasionally, simply “gypsy”). It was almost certainly Phoebe’s forebears who in the 1861 census were recorded as living “In Tents, Broom Street, Graveney, Faversham”. The head of the household was Riley Scamp, occupation shown as “Vagrant”. Living with him were his wife Sarah, née Lee, six sons (Oliver, Riley, William, Samson, Clarence and George) and three  daughters (Charlotte, Cinamentta and Mary). All of the family had been born in Kent. Riley Scamp was born in 1819, and when he died in 1899 his funeral merited a mention in the Folkestone Express, Sandgate, Shorncliffe & Hythe Advertiser, 8th March 1899:

A ROMANY FUNERAL. —Last week at Ramsgate Cemetery, the funeral took place of Riley Scamp, a picturesque figure in Thanet for many years, and the head of a gipsy family well known throughout East

Kent. The deceased, who was of the Romany type, was 79 years old. Formerly he was a van-dweller ; latterly he abandoned that free mode of life. At the funeral quite large crowd assembled, including many of the gipsy tribe.

Assuming this is the correct family, Phoebe’s father William had been born circa 1851 (1852 according to his death registration records).

Phoebe’s family were living at Ickham when she married Joe Smith, a scrap dealer, in 1931. They had met the previous year, at hop-picking time:

Joe: Well, round the campfire at night after we finished hop-picking. She come down to see my sister-in-law, you see, to have a word or two with her, I suppose. And I sat there playing the violin. And we started speaking, and…

Phoebe: My husband, he started to talk about the hop picking, and I was rather bashful and shy.  And I didn’t know much to say at all. As a matter of fact, I was afraid, really, to speak to him, thinking my father and mother would hear me.

Joe: Well… I thought you were shy and so was I.

Phoebe: I were really smiling at him playing the fiddle, you know, and his brother, you see. Keep looking at me and he keep nodding his head, you see, ‘awards ‘im playing this fiddle, because his brother just couldn’t stand the row. We were grinning at each other, you know, but at the time being I never had any more thought of courting or marrying him than flying. And then he said to me “I’d like to write to you when I go home, would you  like to write to me?” I said “Well, you can write and I’ll answer your letters”. And then next year, they come down hop-picking and you said to me, “Would you marry me?” I said, “Well, I’m not old enough really. I’m only seventeen”. So he said there’s lots of girls and boys get married at seventeen and eighteen.

Joe: She was a trouble. I kept writing, you know? And she kept saying she’d see, and all this sort of thing and I got fed up. And every weekend I had off I used to go down there. Never used to go down home because I wouldn’t dare, you see. Her father wouldn’t let her out if I went down home. She say to me “Well, I’ll meet you at the bus stop at Canterbury”, which was the nearest point, you see, where the buses come in, and that’s how we done our courting, and we never did go to the pictures.2

Phoebe recalled that she was desperate to go to see Sonny Boy, the first talkie to come to Canterbury (actually she probably meant the film The Singing Fool, Al Jolson’s follow-up to The Jazz Singer, which featured the song ‘Sonny Boy’, and which was released in the UK in November 1928). But her brother Charlie said “it’s not good for girls to go to the pictures… it learns them things they never ought to know” and the resultant argument led to her father forbidding either of them from going.

Joe: We never  did go to the pictures and I never did walk nowhere with her, only from the bus to the bus stop, put her on the bus that used to go home. That’s where I used to meet her and where I used to leave her, at the bus stop. That used to annoy me, you know, I used to get fair bored with it. All my worries were not getting her in a row, you see […]

Phoebe: So of course we just signed the register and away we come out. He got hold of my hand, and then he said “God bless you, Phoebe, you’re a nice girl”.

Joe: I remember that. I remember saying that, and I remember you wished me the best of luck.

Phoebe’s father said that he wouldn’t have given consent for her to marry so young, only when she was 21, but “that’s three more years, perhaps I wouldn’t live that long anyway”. And indeed he died within a year (Phoebe said that “He died 12 months after I were married”; the official records show that his death was registered in the Thanet district in the second quarter of 1931). Phoebe and Joe’s first child – also named Joe – arrived within a year of their marriage, and money was tight. Joe recalled that “It was very hard times then, wasn’t it? I’m working steady […] But still, we carried on. We didn’t owe anybody nothing. That was a job to make ends meet”. When she was able to, Phoebe started to make floral Christmas decorations to earn some extra cash, and also did farmwork, “fruit-picking or pea-picking or anything”.

Joe found them a home to move to at 57 St Chad’s Road, Tilbury, Essex, and they were living here at the time of the 1939 Register. Joe’s occupation was given as “Caterpillar Driver – Oil Co”. He was navvying with pick and shovel at the start of the war, but then  moved on to operating a D8 Caterpillar, cutting chalk. This may have been a sedentary job, but it was physically demanding – “I have come ‘ome of a night time with, with my arms aching so I could hardly make a cigarette”. Joe’s work took him to Scotland at one point, although Phoebe stayed behind in Essex, doing agricultural work. And then, when the farmwork stopped, “I’d go on making these wax roses, roses, daffs, tulips […] I think it’s the most nicest job I’ve ever done is going selling flowers”.

As a port town on the Thames, Tilbury was frequently the target of German air raids. During one heavy raid, when they had had to abandon their home and take shelter elsewhere, a policeman came to find Phoebe to tell her that her mother had died.

Then that’s when I began to realise that everything was gone. At the beginning, I didn’t bother about the ‘ome, I didn’t bother about anything, as long as we were alive. That was everything you see. But when I lost my mother, I thought, well, I don’t know, everything seemed to be going…

At some point after the war Phoebe and Joe moved to Melton near Woodbridge, where Joe ran a scrap-metal business, and this is where they remained for the rest of their lives. Frank Purslow described it thus:

Near a small Suffolk market town is a well-conducted scrap metal business run by Joe Smith and some of his sons. Next to the yard, in a neat garden, stands the Smiths’ bungalow (built mostly by family labour) surrounded by the trailers of the Smith boys and their families.3

Mike Yates recalled

In those days Phoebe and her husband Joe were living in a bungalow at the side of a moderately busy road. There was a small scrap yard at the side of their home, where Joe and his sons worked. I think what most impressed me on my first visit was Joe and Phoebe’s large collection of Crown Derby porcelain. Every shelf and furniture top seemed to be holding yet another prize piece. They clearly loved their collection and were only too happy to tell me how the horse-drawn gypsy waggons of old had always been full of similar items.4

Phoebe had learned most of her song repertoire in Kent. Mike Yates notes that “Phoebe learnt many of her songs as a young girl from her elder sisters. Her uncle, Oliver Scamp, a Kentish horse-dealer, was also an important source of songs”, while she told Frank Purslow that she learned one song from her favourite uncle, her father’s brother George. Peter Kennedy provides details of the specific sources for several songs: ‘The Oxford Girl’ came from her uncle Oliver, “a Ramsgate tinker who could make a kettle out of a penny”; she had ‘Young Ellender’ from her mother; and ‘Higher Germanie’ and ‘Molly Vaughan’ were learned “from her uncle, George Scamp, the horse-dealer”.5 Phoebe’s son Manny, quoted in the booklet to the 1998 CD The Yellow Handkerchief, said:

A lot of her songs she learned from her mother and father and ‘Higher Germany’ came from her oldest sister, Polly [born 1900, Blean] and her younger brother Henry had a good voice. Her uncles Bill and George were also great singers and Bill had a high pitched voice. If he was singing in another room and you couldn’t see him you would swear it was a woman singing.”

The different sources given for ‘Higher Germany’ are not necessarily contradictory – it’s likely that Phoebe had heard both her mother and older sister singing the song.

Peter Kennedy was the first to record Phoebe. When searching for songs in Kent in January 1954 he visited a Mrs. Stanley, who was living in a caravan on a farm near the Three Chimneys pub, between Biddenden and Sissinghurst. Although Mrs Stanley had tonsilitis, Kennedy’s notes record that “She gave us address of her sister Mrs. Smith, Melton Meadows, Melton, Woodbridge, Suffolk. Her husband, Joe, plays fiddle and melodeon”6. Over the next few days Kennedy recorded songs from Phoebe Smith’s step-brother Charlie Scamp at Chartham Hatch, and from Oliver Scamp (possibly Phoebe’s uncle) at Lower Halstow. He visited the Smiths in Suffolk as part of his collecting trip to East Anglia in July 1956 (although possibly this was a return visit – some years later he wrote “From the time I first met Phoebe it took nearly two years before she was able fully to record for me her family songs, in July 1956”7). A copy of his report on this collecting trip can be found at https://www.peterkennedyarchive.org/1956-2/east-anglia-1956/. It commences

Friday 6th: Collected machines and tapes, drove to Woodbridge making a number of calls in Essex en route without much success.

Saturday 7th: Made a number of calls in Woodbridge and arranged to record the Smith’s, gipsies, and Jim Baldry a painter and decorator at Melton.

Sunday 9th: Recorded from Mrs Phoebe Smith (42). Joe her husband had unfortunately hurt his hand in the meantime and was unable to play step-dance tunes on fiddle.

The songs collected from Phoebe Smith on this occasion were:

  • A Blacksmith courted me
  • I am a Romany
  • Shannon Side (Captain Thunderbolt)
  • Molly Varden (Shooting of his dear)
  • Higher Germanie
  • Young Ellender
  • The Oxford Girl
  • Pretty Betsy.

He visited the Smiths again in 1962, and on this occasion was able to record Joe playing the fiddle, and their eldest son Joe singing ‘The Riddle Song’, and playing step-dance tunes on the harmonica.

Phoebe told Peter Kennedy that she had been a mouth organ player:

I used to love to play the mouth organ and I began to play it very well, but my father used to say to me, “Phoebe, you mustn’t play that. That’ll give you horrible thick lips”. And I said, “Well, you won’t stop me from dancing will you, Daddy?” Used to say “No. You Can Dance. I love to see you dance, love to hear you sing”.

The step dancing was not without its issues, however – once, when step dancing, she kicked the toes out of her best boots, with the result that her father bought her a pair of boy’s shoes to dance in.

Kennedy put out his recordings on a Folktrax cassette, noting

Although Phoebe & Joe were living in a bungalow with hop-plants in the garden, they still had their wagons there, alongside their scrap-metal business, and most of the chat and singing was around the campfire.8

The Folktrax cassette also included extracts from their conversation, but Phoebe was unhappy about this, when she came to know, as she had not been aware that the material would ever be made available to the public at large.9 It has to be said that, nearly 70 years on, these recordings have proved invaluable in assembling this biographical sketch, and they also show Phoebe and Joe in a very positive light, as a devoted and loving couple.

By the time Kennedy’s Foktrax cassette was released, Phoebe Smith’s singing could be heard on three LPs on the Topic record. The first of these was Once I Had a True Love (Topic 12T193) released in 1970. The songs on this LP were recorded by Paul Carter, but the sessions were directed by Frank Purslow. Phoebe Smith had been the first traditional singer that Purslow saw, when she performed at Ewan MacColl’s Ballads and Blues club and, as he wrote later, “Phoebe was a revelation!”. Another London appearance had attracted the attention Paul Carter:

It must have been early 1969 when I went to Woodbridge to record Phoebe Smith. Her singing had much impressed me when I heard her at Cecil Sharp House, and I 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. 10

Although Carter argued that it was simply a matter of adjusting the head alignment on Topic’s machine, the record company said that these tapes were unusable, so Carter and Purslow went back to Suffolk, and recorded the songs for a second time. The Topic LP Once I had a True Love was released in 1970. Frank Purslow’s notes for the album describe Phoebe as “a warm, homely, motherly woman adored by her family, despite the strict upbringing they have received at her hands. To Phoebe the most important things in her life are her home, her husband, her family and her friends”. He continued

Both Joe and Phoebe come from backgrounds where the importance of making one’s own entertainment was a necessity – and a tradition. From her childhood Phoebe had been a stepper, tapper and singer.

[…] “In those days,” she told me, “people used to make their own amusements, used to have nice week-ends together, used to sit round and have a little sing-song; and of course you’d learn songs from your parents, and you’d learn them from the people that used to come round. They were made of things that really happened. I mean, years ago when I was a child – and I’m not all that old – we never had radios and that sort of thing; and of course things that happened they used to make songs about, and stories. People used to learn them by listening to other people singing them. I learned one particularly from my father’s brother George. He was my favourite uncle, and I remember he used to get me on his knee and give me sixpence to sing for him. I used to love to hear him sing, he used to be – well you know – so dedicated into his songs when he was singing . . . he used to help the songs.”

When l asked Phoebe what attracted her to a particular song, she was quite definite. “l like the words of a song to have a real, true meaning, and I like a tune that goes according to the words and the happenings in the song. You can imagine – I can – as well as feeling for them – things that happened – what they did. I can picture them, you know, in the sorrow parts as well as the happiness. They’re human. Oh! I sing modern songs as well; there’s some very very, nice modern songs, but I don’t think they hit you quite so deep inside, because a lot of the songs today are just made up from out of the wind. No, I never went out and had music lessons, or dancing or singing lessons. All I learned I was self taught or from my parents. And l think that is the only true way that anyone can call themselves a tapper or a singer. I mean, if you learn it yourself you’re interested, you’re dedicated. There’s a lot of people today that do it just to get around and some money and that sort of thing. They don’t do it for the love of it, they just do it for what they can get. I always did singing and tapping and dancing just to please myself and make other people happy.”

Purslow also explained that

I have long since wanted to see her on record, but she is rather a difficult singer to record satisfactorily. Attempts to record her at “special occasions” have failed to capture what I consider to be the real Phoebe. Faced with a strange audience she tends to put on a “performance”. So we sat with Phoebe and Joe in their lounge and chatted and drank tea and then recorded a few songs. The results were excellent. A few days later I visited them again and had a long chat with Phoebe about the songs and her attitude to them, which I taped, and which shows how aware she is of the content of the songs and their meaning – and the tradition behind them, a living tradition, of which she, and Joe, and the family are a vital part.

Reviewing Once I had a True Love in the 1971 Folk Music Journal, Peter Kennedy wrote that having Phoebe’s songs available on record “realizes a long- awaited dream”. The album did not meet an entirely positive reception, however. Frank Purslow considered that Phoebe’s uninhibited singing style in front of an audience represented a put on “performance”, and that he had captured the “real Phoebe”. Others held a diametrically opposite view. The singer Danny Stradling, who met Phoebe and heard her singing in the 1960s and 1970s, has called the album “a travesty”, and relates that

in the months after the release of this record she was very unhappy with the outcome, and told me “they kept telling me to do it again because I didn’t do it the same as last time”.11

The “last time” here presumably referring to Paul Carter and Frank Purslow’s first attempt to record her for Topic. But, really, they should have been aware that it was unrealistic (and insensitive) to expect any traditional singer – still less one from the travelling community – to turn in an identical rendition of a song on two separate occasions.

Phoebe’s son Manny, quoted in the booklet to the Veteran CD The Yellow Handkerchief, gives a further reason for dissatisfaction with the LP:

Mum had such a clear voice and when she’d had a glass or two of Guinness she would sing and you could hear her at the other end of the village, but when she was recorded for the record (Once I Had a True Love) they wanted her to sound like a folk singer, so her singing is subdued.

This suggests that, as far as her family were concerned, these more restrained performances did not represent the “real Phoebe”.  

It’s worth noting that Paul Carter was probably aware that the recording equipment at his disposal was simply not capable of dealing with the wild, unrestrained style of singing that Phoebe was wont to adopt in public performances. Indeed Musical Traditions editor Rod Stradling believes that “in those days, there was not any microphone available that could record her very dynamic singing properly”, and that it was impossible for any recording to do justice to her singing – “you needed to ‘be there’ to properly appreciate England’s finest female traditional singer”.

Mike Yates, writing in the magazine Traditional Music in 1977 advanced a further theory about the relationship between Phoebe and folk song collectors:

I have heard it suggested that when Hamish Henderson discovered Jeannie Robertson and played those first tapes to English and American collectors, some or those collectors then went out determined to find an English female singer of equal stature. The implication, of course, is that Phoebe Smith was that discovery and that she was asked, directly or indirectly, to alter her singing style, to slow down her pace, to emphasise certain notes in far greater detail etc. Some readers may dismiss this as rubbish ; but it intrigues me that Phoebe is the only English singer that I have heard who sings in this manner. The other members of her family – sisters and brothers including the Kent gypsy Charlie Scamp who now lives in Faversham – that I have heard certainly sound no different from most other gypsy singers. The matter is still unresolved in my mind.12

Mike Yates spent time with Phoebe in the 1970s, and some of the songs he recorded appear on the Topic LPs Songs of the Open Road (12T253, 1975) and The Travelling Songster (12TS304, 1977) and, subsequently, on the Veteran CD The Yellow Handkerchief (VT136CD, 1998). Mike wrote:

I first heard of Phoebe Smith in 1963, when I was working a Cecil Sharp House as an assistant to Peter Kennedy. Peter had recorded Phoebe as a part of the BBC collecting scheme and he was busy transcribing her songs when I first went to work for him. Some years later I began collecting songs from English gypsies and travellers and whilst in Faversham, Kent, I met Phoebe’s relatives who told me that she was still an active singer. They gave me her telephone number and, within days, I was in Suffolk, driving out of Woodbridge along the Melton road looking for her home.

[…]

When I visited Phoebe I was aware that she had also been recorded by Paul Carter […] on behalf of Topic Records. There seemed little point in going over old ground and so we worked on the songs that Phoebe had learnt in her youth, many of which lay half-buried in the depth of her memory. Some songs came back quickly. Others had to be coaxed, verse by verse, sometimes line by line, until she was happy that she could recall no more of the song. And what songs they were

[…]

Phoebe and Joe Smith came from large families and were used to entertaining. They loved social gatherings such as dances, where Joe would play his fiddle, or pub singsongs where Phoebe would sing and step-dance, and they especially loved the company of other people. I think that they were two of the kindest and most likeable people that I ever met, and I am very glad that John Howson is now able to make so many of their songs available again. I know that Phoebe and Joe would approve.

Phoebe Smith died on 8th November 2001 at  the age of eighty-eight. She and Joe had seven sons: Joe, Henry, Nick, John, Manny, Fred and Tom, and by the time of her death the family had expanded to include thirty grandchildren, fifty-four great grandchildren and twenty great, great grand-children.  

Songs

Recorded by Peter Kennedy:

  • A Blacksmith Courted Me (Roud 816)
  • Captain Thunderbolt (Roud 1453)
  • Down by the Sheepfold (Roud 559)
  • Higher Germanie (Roud 904)
  • The Hopping Song (Roud 1715)
  • I am a Romany (Roud 4844)
  • Jolly Herring (The Herring Song ) (Roud 128)
  • Molly Varden (Roud 166)
  • The Oxford Girl (Roud 263)
  • Young Ellender (Roud 1417)

Recorded by Paul Carter and Frank Purslow:

  • A Blacksmith Courted Me (Roud 816)
  • The Dear Little Maiden (Roud 1751)
  • Higher Germany (Roud 904)
  • Molly Vaughan (Roud 166)
  • Once I Had a True Love (Roud 170)
  • The Tan Yard Side (Roud 1021)
  • The Wexport Girl (Roud 263)
  • The Yellow Handkerchief (Roud 954)
  • Young Ellender (Roud 1417)

Recorded by Mike Yates:

  • Barbara Allen (Roud 54, Child 84)
  • Captain Thunderbold (Roud 1453)
  • Dear Louise (Roud 23792)
  • Green Bushes (Roud 1040)
  • Jolly Herring (Roud 128)
  • Johnny Abourne (Roud 600)
  • Lavender (Roud 854)
  • Old Gypsy’s Waggon (Romany Rye) (Roud 13213)
  • Raking the Hay (Roud 855)
  • The Sheepfold (Roud 559)
  • Wings of a Swallow (Old Rocky Road) (Roud 13214)
  • Young Morgan (Roud 5369)

Others:

Discography

  • Once I Had a True Love, Topic Records 12T193 (LP, 1970), TSDL193 (digital download, 2009)
  • The Yellow Handkerchief, Veteran VT136CD (CD, 2001)

Songs by Phoebe Smith also appear on

  • Songs of the Open Road: Gypsies, Travellers & Country Singers, Topic Records 12T253 (LP, 1975), TSDL253 (digital download, 2009) – Mike Yates recordings
  • The Travelling Songster: An Anthology From Gypsy Singers, Topic Records 12TS304 (LP, UK, 1977), TSDL304 (digital download, 2013) – Mike Yates recordings
  • Songs of the Travelling People: Music of the Tinkers, Gipsies and Other Travelling People of England, Scotland and Ireland, Saydisc CD-SDL 407, (CD, 1994) – Peter Kennedy recordings

and on several volumes of Topic Records’ Voice of the People series – see the discography on the Mainly Norfolk website https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/records/phoebesmith.html

  1. Mike Yates, notes to The Yellow Handkerchief, Veteran VT136CD (2001) ↩︎
  2. I am a Romany, Folktrax FTX100 (1975) ↩︎
  3. Frank Purslow, notes to Once I Had a True Love, Topic TSDL193 (1970) ↩︎
  4. Mike Yates, notes to The Yellow Handkerchief, Veteran VT136CD (2001) ↩︎
  5. Peter Kennedy, review of Once I had a True Love, Folk Music Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1971) ↩︎
  6. Peter Kennedy, Kent Trip January 1954, https://www.peterkennedyarchive.org/1954-2/kent-1954/ ↩︎
  7. Peter Kennedy, review of Once I had a True Love, Folk Music Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1971) ↩︎
  8. Peter Kennedy, notes to I am a Romany, Folktrax FTX100 (1975) ↩︎
  9. Mike Yates, Review of I am a Romany, Traditional Music No. 6, 1977 ↩︎
  10. Paul Carter, quoted in Mike Butler, Sounding the Century: Bill Leader & Co. Vol. 3, Troubador, 2023, p172-173 ↩︎
  11. Danny Stradling, review of The Yellow Handkerchief, Musical Traditions, 1998, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/reviews/p_smith.htm ↩︎
  12. Mike Yates, Review of ‘I am a Romany’, Traditional Music No. 6, 1977 ↩︎

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