Sophie Legg

Sophie Orchard, traveller and folk singer: born Hatt, Cornwall 20 April 1918; married 1939 George Legg (died 1997; one son, one daughter); died Bodmin, Cornwall 6 June 2007.

A passionately proud Romany, Sophie Legg was one of the last links between the traditional itinerant gypsy culture and modern folk song. She only made one album and her performances were confined to family gatherings and informal pub sessions, yet her songs - passed down through the generations - continue to resonate, representing the enduring spirit of a fast-disappearing lifestyle.

Youngest of five children in the Orchard family, Sophie spent her childhood in a horse-drawn wagon, bought by her father Edwin with the proceeds of bare-knuckle fighting bouts. They travelled mainly through Cornwall, but occasionally ventured further afield to sell their wares at markets and local fairs, where her parents ran a coconut shy. Sophie constantly changed schools and also played a role in the family business of hawking - knocking on people's doors selling everything from firewood and trinkets to underwear and pots and pans. "You'd get one or two slamming the door in your face, but that was just ignorance," she said. "Most people were pleased to see us because they knew we had good stuff. A lot of them would wait for us to come."

Nights were spent in a tent and she was 16 before she slept under a roof for the first time. When the horses repeatedly started going lame on the harder roads, Sophie's father built a bungalow on land he'd bought in Launceston and they settled down. Yet they still converged on fairs to meet up with other branches of the family to sit around camp-fires to drink, chat in the Romany language, step-dance and sing.

Both her parents sang (her mother Susan was also regarded as a fine step-dancer) and Sophie naturally picked up the songs she'd heard from her mother, though she was modest and claimed her voice was far inferior to her elder sisters Betsy and Charlotte. "I never had any real ambition to be a singer," she said. "That type of singing was going out and the more modern singing was coming in - country and western and that sort of thing - and I wasn't called on to sing so much."

In 1939 she married a Gloucestershire man, George Legg, a member of South Cerney mummer dancers. He was a gorgio (non-gypsy), which may have been frowned on in some circles of the travelling community, but not the Orchards. Sophie's sisters Betsy and Charlotte also married gorgios, who happened to be brothers. They were warmly welcomed and fully accepted into the family by the Romanies, yet ostracised by their own families. The marriage also marked a resumption of Sophie's travelling lifestyle - George Legg was an itinerant electrical power-supply worker and they moved from town to town.

Before the war her father had bought a row of houses in Bodmin and in 1946 Sophie and George Legg settled there, with other members of the family gradually taking up residence in neighbouring houses. Their singing and dancing traditions resumed in earnest, especially at Christmas time, when other family members would arrive and celebrate their old customs.

Sophie was to spend the rest of her life in Bodmin but never lost her pride in her Romany roots and loved to sing the "old songs" and talk of her early days on the road in the wagon. However, she disliked being called a "gypsy", regarding it as an insult. "It's really a derogatory term for Egyptian," she said. "It's like calling the French 'Froggies'. As far as I'm concerned we're Romany."

In 1978 Pete Coe recorded the 60-year-old Sophie for Veteran Records on her only album, Catch Me If You Can: songs from the Cornish travellers, with her sisters Charlotte and Betsy Renals (then 78 and 77 respectively). It included her favourite song "Down By the Old Riverside" and others from the repertoire that had become a staple diet of the folk-club movement, including "Jim the Carter Lad" and "Catch Me If You Can", which Coe later recorded himself.

Both her son Vic and daughter Vivienne inherited Sophie's singing ability and both have made their own albums. Vic, who still sings many of his mother's songs, was also a founder member of Bodmin Folk Club where Sophie became a regular visitor, though years of heavy smoking had left her breathless and unable to sing. She was, however, heard in a speaking role on Viv Legg's Romany Roots (Veteran, 2006) and gave a talk about her life at the 2004 Cornwall Folk Festival.

The day before she died, Sophie Legg implored her son Vic to sing "The Wild Colonial Boy" and taught him a new verse of the old ballad "The Golden Vanity". "It's a good thing to keep the old songs going," she said, "otherwise it's going to die out."

Colin Irwin