Considering his genes and his upbringing, it is no surprise that Bob Copper became such an energetic promoter of Britain’s folksong legacy. At least four generations of Coppers had prepared the ground with their passion for the poetry and music of the traditional English songs that tell us so much about farmworkers’ lives through two centuries and more. Copper’s earliest memories were of winter evenings, sitting round the fire at home in Rottingdean, East Sussex, singing songs such as The Banks of the Sweet Primroses, The Honest Labourer and The Brisk Young Ploughboy with his grandfather James (b 1845) and his father Jim (b 1882).

His grandfather recalled singing the romantic folk-song Shepherd of the Downs with both of his own grandfathers in the middle years of the 19th century. And in a remarkable feat of continuity, he sang that song with Bob Copper, too, who, 80 years later, at the beginning of the 21st century, was to sing it with his own grandchildren: one song linking at least seven generations without a break.

As he continued to sing the song in pubs and clubs well into his eighties, Bob Copper said he still had James and Jim’s voices ringing in his head, and tried to keep the music just as they had sung it: the sound of 200 years ago.

It was the combined imagination and determination of James, Jim and Bob Copper that, in the 20th century, saved for posterity dozens of these traditional songs — the words, the tunes and the old ways of rendering them. By the 1920s and 1930s the growth of other forms of home entertainment meant that most farmworking families no longer had the same incentive to preserve the custom of singing round the fire, but James, Jim and Bob enjoyed the old ways too much to let them disappear.

Significantly, it was in this period that James and Jim created the family’s first permanent records of their folk-singing tradition by writing out the words of their favourite songs. Then, from the 1950s onwards, Bob helped to preserve the music, too, with sound recordings (for radio, television, LPs and CDs) and live performances. He stands with his father and grandfather as a dedicated communicator, not just of 18th and 19th-century folk-songs, but of ways of life now vanished.

Robert James Copper was born at Rottingdean, on the East Sussex coast, in the fifth month of the First World War. It was a world far removed from the horrors of the trenches. His father Jim, like his father James before him, was bailiff on a 3,000-acre sheep and arable farm, which explains why there were so many agrarian references in the songs they sang. Copper was hugely proud of his grandfather James, who had started work as a shepherd boy at the age of 8 but who was ambitious enough, ten years later, to take himself off with his younger brother Tom, twice a week after work, to learn reading and writing at a penny a lesson from the village schoolmaster.

Only thus was James able, in 1922, to write down (in beautiful script but often entertainingly misspelt) the words of 28 of his favourite songs; the family still treasures that manuscript.

Well known locally as singers, James and Tom were also among the first honorary members of the Folk Song Society in its very early days in the late 1890s, having helped the society’s secretary, on a visit to Rottingdean, to note down some of their 50-strong repertoire of songs.

From the age of six, in 1921, Bob Copper did all the boy’s jobs on the farm: flint-picking, bird-scaring and acting as tarboy at sheep-shearing time. But rural Sussex was changing, and much of the farm on which his father worked had been sold off as building land by the time Copper left school at 13. So, instead of following his father on to the farm, he went to work as a lather boy in the village barber’s shop. It was an uncongenial job for a boy who loved being out of doors, but as he grew bigger and stronger, there came a spell working on the sea defences, and he also started, on Saturday nights, to accompany his father to Rottingdean’s Black Horse Inn, where the regulars would call on them both for a song.

At the age of nearly 18, in 1932, Copper left home for London and the Household Cavalry, where, in peacetime, his duties were not as exciting as he had hoped and included no foreign postings; instead, he was one of the party of Life Guards who escorted the Duke and Duchess of Kent from Buckingham Palace at the start of their honeymoon in November 1934.

During his leaves spent at home, the family singsongs continued unabated, despite the death in 1924 of grandfather James. The Coppers’ voices may have been untutored, and they could none of them read music, but to them singing was like breathing. They sang at work and they sang at play. They even sang at moments of domestic crisis: Copper remembered that his father’s rendition of What’s the Life of a Man took on an extra poignancy if Mrs Copper had been berating him for a misdemeanour.

Their tuneful, rhythmical voices needed no instrumental accompaniment, and received none, but there was plenty of harmonising, with bass parts (sung by Jim or James) frequently underlying the melody (sung by Bob, his uncle John or his cousin Ron).

By the 1930s, the two young cousins, Bob and Ron, about the same age, were well aware that their traditional songs were no longer to the liking of most of their contemporaries, and contented themselves with singing their old favourites when no one else was about. On many an early morning, “I am a brisk and bonny lad and free from care and strife, / And sweetly as the hours pass I love a country life” would ring through the air as the two of them went rabbiting, mushrooming or prawning.