Fred Jordan: We Shepherds are the Best of Men

A Shropshire farm labourer who lived in a cottage without running water sounds like the sort of singer who should have been collected by Cecil Sharp or George Butterworth before the First World War.

Yet Fred Jordan lived to sing at folk festivals in the 21st century.

He was born at Ludlow in 1922 and left school at the age of 14. He was recorded by the BBC in the early 1950s and subsequently left Shropshire for the first time to sing at the Royal Festival Hall and at folk clubs around the country.

He lived for most of his life in the village of Aston Munslow and died at a care home in Ditton Priors in 2002.

Fred Jordan sang We Shepherds Are the Best of Men on his 1966 album Songs of a Shropshire Farm Worker.

Later. The video I originally posted has disappeared from YouTube, so here is another one of him.