Biography
Cyril Poacher lent his affable yet eccentric presence to countless Topic folk-song anthologies and, beginning in the 1970s, also issued several complete solo albums at a stage of life when many careers suggest stepping aside. Like his father, he spent nearly all his working years as a cowman, so performing never felt like labor; he left school at 14 and took a farm job in Blaxhall for roughly ten dollars a week, later moving to a Tunstall farm that paid fifteen. In 1940, while employed as a county road man, he entered the British Army, yet returned to agriculture in 1946 and stayed at Blaxhall’s Grove Farm until retiring in 1975—the same year he cut the Broomfield Wager album for Topic. As a boy he absorbed dozens of songs from his grandfather, William “Cronie” Ling, and from Ling’s brothers, although he did not perform publicly until at least age 19. That first appearance took place at The Ship Inn, an East Anglian pub, prompted by the same impulse that drives many musicians: the chance to drink for free, since a round was traded for either a recitation or a song.
Poacher continued to sing for beer throughout his life, yet in the village tradition this practice followed strict customs: particular songs were regarded as the property of specific individuals, and only they—or, occasionally, someone when the owner and his circle were absent—could perform them. The system functioned as an informal copyright long before television, jukeboxes, or royalty-collection agencies existed. Poacher’s generation grew up listening to older men who each claimed a share of such material; because those men kept singing into their eighties, the likelihood of inheriting a song through an owner’s death remained remote. Poacher and his companions therefore began seeking material from beyond the immediate area, locating it on the radio, on gramophone discs, and on inexpensive broadside sheets. Their repertory thus combined village-to-village oral transmission with the twentieth-century media changes that later turned younger listeners toward the Beatles rather than the aging singers still heard in local taverns.
From that same barroom platform Poacher witnessed the repeated surges and retreats of the British folk revival. He was only in his late fifties when he reportedly grew weary of pub singing because audiences no longer listened with the old attentiveness. All of his recording work occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when his live appearances were limited to occasional festivals and infrequent local sessions. Village music-making had already withdrawn into itself during the 1950s, in contrast to the outward expansion then occurring in Irish music, partly because local performers had been overtaxed by an early-1950s film project involving Alan Lomax. Poacher himself was reportedly required to deliver nineteen takes of the long ballad “The Nutting Girl.” Lomax had promised the finished film would be shown at the Blaxhall Ship so villagers unable to travel could see it, yet he never kept the pledge, leaving lasting resentment. Anyone acquainted with Lomax’s song-publishing practices might have warned the singers they were fortunate their copyrights had not been claimed.
Poacher’s unaccompanied style has received the same close technical scrutiny usually reserved for operatic performance. Even the informal pub setting sometimes surfaces in scholarly notes: one Topic annotator observed that “Cyril Poacher uses more grace notes than in his earlier songs, possibly because of the amount he has drunk.” Fellow singer Keith Summers recalled that Poacher “could be a cantankerous old bugger on occasion.” His most widely remembered recorded utterance is spoken rather than sung—an impromptu remark at the close of a Topic compilation urging his companions, “come on boys, you should keep this going.”
Poacher continued to sing for beer throughout his life, yet in the village tradition this practice followed strict customs: particular songs were regarded as the property of specific individuals, and only they—or, occasionally, someone when the owner and his circle were absent—could perform them. The system functioned as an informal copyright long before television, jukeboxes, or royalty-collection agencies existed. Poacher’s generation grew up listening to older men who each claimed a share of such material; because those men kept singing into their eighties, the likelihood of inheriting a song through an owner’s death remained remote. Poacher and his companions therefore began seeking material from beyond the immediate area, locating it on the radio, on gramophone discs, and on inexpensive broadside sheets. Their repertory thus combined village-to-village oral transmission with the twentieth-century media changes that later turned younger listeners toward the Beatles rather than the aging singers still heard in local taverns.
From that same barroom platform Poacher witnessed the repeated surges and retreats of the British folk revival. He was only in his late fifties when he reportedly grew weary of pub singing because audiences no longer listened with the old attentiveness. All of his recording work occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when his live appearances were limited to occasional festivals and infrequent local sessions. Village music-making had already withdrawn into itself during the 1950s, in contrast to the outward expansion then occurring in Irish music, partly because local performers had been overtaxed by an early-1950s film project involving Alan Lomax. Poacher himself was reportedly required to deliver nineteen takes of the long ballad “The Nutting Girl.” Lomax had promised the finished film would be shown at the Blaxhall Ship so villagers unable to travel could see it, yet he never kept the pledge, leaving lasting resentment. Anyone acquainted with Lomax’s song-publishing practices might have warned the singers they were fortunate their copyrights had not been claimed.
Poacher’s unaccompanied style has received the same close technical scrutiny usually reserved for operatic performance. Even the informal pub setting sometimes surfaces in scholarly notes: one Topic annotator observed that “Cyril Poacher uses more grace notes than in his earlier songs, possibly because of the amount he has drunk.” Fellow singer Keith Summers recalled that Poacher “could be a cantankerous old bugger on occasion.” His most widely remembered recorded utterance is spoken rather than sung—an impromptu remark at the close of a Topic compilation urging his companions, “come on boys, you should keep this going.”
Albums