Ray Fisher

Ray Fisher, who has died aged 70 of cancer, was one of the UK’s foremost singers of traditional songs. It was said around the Dowanhill area of Glasgow in the post-war years that you couldn’t throw a stone in Havelock Street without hitting a Fisher. If you’d been so unwise – the man of the house was a police inspector – there was almost a one in two chance that you’d have hit a Fisher who would go on to have major significance on the Scottish folk scene.

There was Archie, the outstanding singer, guitarist, songwriter and subsequently presenter of Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk, and Cilla, the youngest of six sisters, whose award-winning folksinging career developed into the hugely popular Singing Kettle children’s shows. Possibly the least wise target for stone-throwing, though, was Ray who, as well as becoming a priceless carrier of the folksong tradition and a warm mentor to young singing talent, could be a feisty character with a marvellously sharp tongue.

She never sought the glory of a career in folk music, although she had notable successes early on. Her involvement was more about keeping the old ballads alive, singing them in her own voice, and passing them on to the next generation.

The third child behind Jean and Archie, of a father who sang with Glasgow Police Choir and a Gaelic-speaking mother from Vatersay, she grew up with song all around her. Her father, who made some very early radio recordings, sang songs learned from Father Sidney McEwan and John McCormack and traditional songs such as The Beggarman, and her mother, who would talk to her husband in Gaelic when she didn’t want the children to be in on the conversation, sang Gaelic airs around the house. There was a piano at home that the children weren’t allowed to touch, although young Ray used to watch her father playing, work out the chords and play secretly when he was out.

At school and in the church choir she was always encouraged to sing. She made her first solo public performance, aged eight or nine, at Partick East Church and regularly took part in Glasgow schools’ singing competitions at St Andrew’s Hall. Her father seldom came to hear her, although he would always ask what she had sung, but he did help to prepare her for what was to follow by reading Burns poems by the fireside and familiarising her with the words of songs and poems such as Tam o’ Shanter.

In her teens she came under two further influences, one fleeting – skiffle – the other, long-lasting: the school teacher and later MP Norman Buchan. With Archie, she formed a skiffle duo that evolved into a popular partnership through TV programmes including the BBC’s Hootenanny and STV’s Here and Now and with singer-fiddler Bobby Campbell added, became a trio, The Wayfarers, that prepared the ground for the folk groups who followed.

While Archie introduced her to Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the powerful singing of Seeger’s colleague in The Weavers, Ronnie Gilbert, Norman Buchan pointed her towards the great Scots ballad singers such as Belle Stewart and crucially, Jeannie Robertson, at whose knee and at whose invitation Ray sat and learned the muckle sangs – traditional narrative ballads – in her living-room in Aberdeen.

Her original career intention as a career was to be a teacher and she attended Jordanhill teacher-training college. There she ran a folk club with singer-songwriter Ian Davison and she was regularly whisked by taxi to sing with Archie on television. Perhaps because of this or her attendance at the peace camp at Faslane, she developed a reputation, at least with the college’s Dean of Women, as a troublemaker and she decided to concentrate on music rather than formal teaching.

Her duo with Archie was, anyway, in great demand, travelling all over the UK and winning fans including English folk doyen Martin Carthy, and at The Bridge Folk Club in Newcastle Ray met fiddler and piper Colin Ross, of the High Level Ranters group. They married in 1962. With Ray now living in Whitley Bay and Archie based in Fife, rehearsing new material became a problem and each went solo, with Ray contributing songs to the BBC’s Radio Ballads series. Their debut album for Topic Records, Far Over the Forth, had cemented the siblings’ reputations as singers and Ray went on to record her own albums including The Bonny Birdy, which featured Martin Carthy on guitar, and Traditional Songs of Scotland, which featured Carthy and Colin Ross.

By modern standards she was under-recorded but this did not trouble her. As she told one interviewer, “I don’t feel the need to put things on tape”. She was much more concerned with handing songs on and encouraging young singers through judging, always with a sympathetic word, at folk festival singing competitions and on the Folkworks workshops which later developed into the traditional music degree course at Newcastle University.

Her onstage partnerships with Archie and sister Cilla would resurface when their various schedules allowed and Ray regularly returned to Scotland, treating folk festival and folk club audiences to great ballad singing, witty songs of her own making or re-arranging, and recitations of her “pomes” – which could often be hilariously scurrilous and were always delivered with great comic timing. The quality of her singing was recognised further afield, too, and she sang in the US, Canada, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

The English Folk Dance and Song Association honoured her with its highest accolade, its Gold Badge, for services to traditional singing, and in 2010 she was inaugurated into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame.

She is survived by her husband, Colin Ross, and their children, Andrew, Duncan and Fiona.