Walter Pardon

Edge Documentaries produced a video, "Walter Pardon, a life in song" with interviews with neighbours, friends, and folk luminaries for the Walter Pardon Memorial concert at The Atrium, North Walsham, early 2014.

Pardon is one of four ‘traditional’ singers, with overlapping lifetimes, compared in a 2005 doctoral thesis by David Hillery.

There are a number of field recordings of Walter Pardon singing songs and ballads, and playing, as well as interviews and other material available online at the British Library Sound Archive in the Reg Hall and Roy Palmer collections. A lecture given by Pat Mackenzie and Jim Carroll in 2004 and filmed by Conor McMahon includes excerpts from their interviews with Pardon.

"In 1989, when Walter had passed his seventy-fifth birthday, he decided that his voice was no longer as strong as it had been, and so he stopped singing in public." Walter Pardon died in 1996, and was buried in Swafield churchyard. In 1997 a memorial concert was held at Conway Hall, London to raise money for a headstone.

An article that Pardon wrote about the Knapton Drum and Fife Band after a talk with Mike Yates appeared in the booklet accompanying the posthumous release 'Put a Bit of Powder on it' and may also be read via the MUSTRAD online folk Imagazine. It was originally published in Folk Roots magazine, No 28, October 1985.

In 1983 the American musician and film-maker John Cohen made "The Ballad and the Source", described as "a sensitive musical portrait of Walter Pardon".

Walter Pardon's first LP, A Proper Sort was released in 1975, followed by Our Side of the Baulk in 1977. He appeared at folk clubs and festivals and was invited by A L Lloyd to join a group of English singers attending the American Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. Two more LPs were issued in 1982 and 1983.

Hillery notes that Pardon was recognised as a singer for 22 years, from the date of his first recording, in 1974, to his death in 1996. Hillery contrasts Pardon’s situation with that of a traditional singer who received no such wider attention and who was studied only for a brief time towards the end of his life. “Pardon exemplifies the experience of a ‘traditional’ singer who, coming to the attention of an audience more extensive than a purely local one, attracts the attention of those engaged in tradition as a field of scholarship or entertainment where Walter may be regarded as a primary source … Moreover, during the 22 years of his relative fame, Walter’s motivation to extend and develop his repertoire would clearly have been stimulated, pleased and flattered as he may have been by the admiration he received.”

Walter Pardon's second cousin on his mother's side, Roger Dixon, a history teacher, had as a child heard Walter singing when visiting his parents. In the late 1970s Dixon persuaded Pardon to record twenty of his songs on tape. Dixon gave a copy of the tape to singer Peter Bellamy, who had been his pupil. Bellamy passed the tape on to record producer Bill Leader.

Hillery discusses the motivations and practices of the song-collectors in the first and second revivals, the latter of which covers the case of Pardon. Regarding the second revival, he comments “The more democratic milieu of the 1970s made for a more relaxed social relationship between those and those recording, though this brought other problems of intensified mediation inherent in collectors’ attempts to embed themselves deeper and deeper into the lives of their informants.”

Walter's father died in 1957, and Walter lived alone in the cottage from then on. By his own account he would sit on the stairs in the cottage playing the tunes of his songs on his melodeon.

Walter Pardon (4 March 1914 – 9 June 1996) was an English carpenter, folk singer and recording artist from Knapton, Norfolk, England. He learned songs and tunes from older members of his family and remembered and performed them at a time when most people of his generation were uninterested in traditional music. He was then able to pass his songs and tunes on to a new generation of folk music collectors and performers.

Walter William Pardon was born and brought up in the cottage in Knapton where his mother, Emily (Nee Gee), was born in 1874. He was an only child from a family in which most men were farm workers.

Pardon is said to have learned most of his songs from his uncle, Billy Gee (1863-1942), who lived with Walter and his family. Billy Gee, in turn, had learned much of his repertoire from his father, Thomas Cook Gee. Walter believed his grandfather had learned songs from broadsheets. There were few opportunities for Walter to sing in his younger days. Most people of his generation weren't much interested in old songs, and while his uncle had sung in pub sessions in a nearby town, these sessions were dying out in his neighbourhood by the time he was old enough to attend. His family would exchange songs at Christmas gatherings in the cottage, but these stopped when his mother died in 1953.

According to Pardon's cousin Roger Dixon, singing and music played a big part in the life of the Gee family. Several of the family played violin, accordion or flute. Dixon relates that there were all sorts of family stories about music-making in the past: 'One was that the family formed the church band in the reign of William IV in the 1830s, before the Robinson family provided the first harmonium for the church.' Dixon notes that Pardon kept the big drum of the Knapton Drum and Fife band, formed in the late 19th century, in his shed.