Jim Wilson

Jim Wilson: was born in 1875, and died of cancer in June 1961, a year after these recordings were made.  He was a miller’s roundsman, a railway worker and later a gardener.  He lived with his son’s family in Pearson’s Road, Three Bridges - it was a real railway town and a lot of them worked there.  Jim had ‘a fair repertoire of country songs and knows perhaps another hundred fragments’ according to Mervyn Plunkett.

Brian Matthews remembers that he always stood up to sing, usually with a mischievous twinkle in his one good eye.  He also sang Barbara Allen on the EP Four Sussex Singers (Collector LEB 7), 1961.