I jog around t h e park I still have arthritis i n my left knee, but I manage to get round the park. A wettish day. I sort out thirty books from Marcus. Scrabble: I win , b ut get under Jean Redpath, who has died aged 77, was considered one of the finest folk singers to emerge in the early British folk revival.
In the early Sixties she shared an apartment with Bob Dylan at the epicentre of the American folk revival in Greenwich Village. In fact, I avoid putting a label on anything. She had no formal training and said the best advice she ever received was when she sought the help of a singing coach, to be told that if she wanted to improve, the best thing she could do was go away and sing for 20 years the way she was doing already.
Her mentor was the great Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson, from the School of Scottish Studies, who visited the literary society at her school to give a talk on traditional song. Henderson was to become a firm friend and inspiration. But the half-promise of a singing engagement at a club in Philadelphia lured her east, and when that failed to materialise she moved on to New York.
It was fortuitous timing. Primarily unaccompanied, the gentle quality of her delivery quickly established her as a true voice of the song tradition at a time when authenticity was greatly prized. She took great joy in sharing her passion for Scottish music, giving folklore talks in schools and spending four years as artist-in-residence at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
In she returned to Scotland, taking up residence as a lecturer at the University of Stirling; but she continued to record and perform concerts around the world. Among her most important work was a collaboration with the American composer and ethnomusicologist Serge Hovey, in which they planned a volume campaign to record every song ever written by Robbie Burns with the original tunes used by the poet himself.
