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'Later this week a little gang of co-twangers and I will be piling into the car and heading down to Sussex to do a few songs at a tribute to Shirley Collins, a celebration of her getting an MBE in the New Year honours for services to music. Many people have doubts about the honours system, but mostly that seems to be because of the unfortunate and anachronistic name they have - Empire and all that: one can hardly argue against Benjamin Zephaniah on that score. But surely few can deny that the nation ought to recognise, in some way, the quiet and otherwise unsung (hardly the right word in this context!) things that people like Shirley or Bob Copper have done for us, and in turn put value on the very music that they have served?
I'd seen Shirley perform on a number of occasions - I'm sure she was the first person I ever heard sing what has grown over the years into my favourite English song, The Sweet Primeroses with its life affirming, glass-half-full closing words - but I think that the first time I actually met her was in a Covent Garden pub in early 1969. I'd been one of the organisers of a UK club and concert tour for country blues giant Fred McDowell, who Shirley had been responsible for 'discovering' (another dodgy, loaded word but you know what I mean) along with Alan Lomax a decade earlier, and it was wonderful to put the two of them together again. So Shirley already had a cause-and-effect on my life. Fred had visited the UK once before on one of the American Folk Blues Festivals, and seeing him had comprehensively re-arranged my life.
Fast forward more than 30 years and - as recounted in these pages before - one of Shirley's scrupulous sleeve notes on the source of a song helped me to discover a hitherto unrevealed ancestral secret, that my great grandmother had traditional songs collected from her by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1904. That, I can tell you, was certainly another life re-arranger. And these are just a few small personal things: add to those the much bigger picture, the many thousands of people whose musical lives Shirley has touched as source, inspiration or example, and that's exactly why it's good to give her national recognition. A national treasure.'
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