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- Barbara was raised in a musical family in
North Wiltshire and found folk music through teachers at school in
Calne and the Ballad & Blues Club in Swindon, before moving to Bristol and encountering
the Bristol Troubadour and the Folk Tradition club. She trained
as a teacher at Bath, specialising in music and drama.
Tom's family were also singers and musicians, on both sides through several
generations. Born of a Scottish father and a London mother, and raised in Sussex, he escaped school
and went to work on the land in Cornwall where he encountered the extant Cornish song and
music tradition through people such as Charlie Bate, Mervyn Vincent and Bob Cann together
with innumerable other singers who met regularly in pubs or at home and sang for
the joy of it. There was also a thriving folk revival in Cornwall in the Sixties.
It is this background in both the tradition and the fledgling folk
revival that has deeply influenced both Tom and Barbara's interest,
approach and attitude to the material.
Tom and Barbara discovered each other as kindred spirits over the course of Mayday in Padstow
in 1969 and married in 1970. They have been singing and organising together
ever
since. Although their speciality is songs of the West Country, their repertoire draws from a
huge range of traditional and, to a lesser extent, modern songs. Barbara rapidly gave up
playing guitar once she had Tom's instrumental ability on guitar,
mandola, concertina and melodeon to accompany her. They both enjoy
working with other singers and musicians and, in 1971 formed the
vocal/instrumental group Culpepper (while Barbara was working for an
auctioneer firm and Tom was working at a special school for disturbed
adolescent boys). After moving from North Devon to Exeter in 1980, when Tom
succeeded Bill Rutter as Regional Development Officer,
for the English Folk Dance and Song Society, they teamed up with Charley Yarwood to form the
a capella trio Regalia. By this time they had two daughters to raise, and when Tom was
made redundant they moved to London to get work - Tom in Local Government Arts
and Barbara
in Community Transport.
Pressures of work, raising the daughters and Tom enrolling as an Arts
Management student at City University
all but halted their performance work for several years but in 1998, after 15 years in
London, they escaped (in Tom's case for a second time) from the South-East and settled again
back home in North Devon. Tom now has a PhD to his name, to add to his
MA, and they are now working full-time at the singing (and in Tom's case calling),
with gigs all over the UK. And they're loving every minute of
it!
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