A friend of mine asked if I would post the original photograph that I used as the source material for the watercolour in the last post. It comes from the sleeve of an old record cover.
Tommy Armstrong was a writer of songs that told wonderful stories and recorded remarkable events in the area that he spent his life. In fact that area is the one that I was brought up in, part of a family whose life experiences were interlinked with some of the events represented in the songs. The album was first issued 1965 and one of the artists involved, Tom Gilfellon, and his family have been family friends since I can remember. The album has been reissued on CD and I can't recommend it highly enough if you have any interest in the history and lives of folks in the Durham coalfield.
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