We were saddened to hear that Paul Marsh had died. He was a very active supporter of traditional song and singings and I asked his friend, Steve Roud, to write a few words about him.
PAUL MARSH: A PERSONAL RECOLLECTION
Steve Roud (24th April 2018)
It was a complete shock to everyone in our field when Paul’s death was announced on 23rd April 2018. He was a stalwart of the traditional music scene in Hampshire for decades, a founder member of the TSF, and liked and respected by everyone he came in contact with.
He was only 67.
I first met Paul when I moved to Hampshire in 1975, and we very quickly became firm friends and comrades. I was particularly interested in Mumming Plays at the time, and as his uncle Tom had been in the Otterbourne gang, we started a project to collect all we could find about the custom in the county. Paul instigated the revival of the play, and performances still take place every year.
We met Mervyn Plunkett, at that time a ‘retired’ collector (although there was nothing ‘retiring’ about him) and a few years in his company provided a baptism of fire in all things traditional for both of us. Paul got on well with everyone, and older traditional musicians in particular recognised him as a kindred spirit. He was a fine singer, melodeon, mouthorgan and bones player.
Paul soon realised that his particular area of interest and expertise was sound recordings. Not only did he make recordings of numerous sessions when the rest of us were too busy making a noise, but he made strenuous efforts to gather other collections that were in danger of being lost or forgotten. He was acutely aware of the fact that traditional song and music exists in the moment, and if not recorded in some way is lost forever.
For me, most of his tangible legacy is therefore in the soundscape of our field, although so often working in the background that his contribution is easy to miss. He revived the local record label Forest Tracks, did digitisation work for Musical Traditions and Topic, carried out most of the work for the Topic tribute to Harry Cox, The Bonny Labouring Boy,which involved extensive research into Harry’s life. And many people trusted him to look after their old tapes and their memories.
The last thing we worked on together was digitising and cataloguing Ken Stubbs’ collection for VWML Online, and Brian Matthews’ tapes for Sussex Traditions, and we had great plans to make safe allthe private sound collections from southern England and make them available.
These are just the things I was involved in, but there were countless other projects with other people, and his digitisation skills were in constant demand – too constant, perhaps, as he never felt he was achieving enough. But he has let me down at last. We often joked about what he would say (and what embarrassing recordings he would play) at my funeral, and I was relying on him to remember those great times we had. We will miss him on many levels.