Bob Davenport had a voice that could silence a pub full of drinkers, and opinions that could silence a room full of folklorists. He died on 27 September 2026, aged 94, having spent seven decades insisting that the music he loved wasn't folk — it was traditional, which is a different thing, and the difference mattered enormously to him. The distinction wasn't pedantic. Cecil Sharp and the early 20th-century collectors had built 'folk music' as a category that excluded music-hall songs, parlour ballads, and anything the urban working class actually sang on a Saturday night. To Davenport, that was class snobbery dressed in academic clothes. He championed the Boldon Banjoes from a County Durham pit village, served as production adviser on John Tchalenko's Arts Council film The Boldon Lad (1980), and argued his whole life that an evening of music should entertain, not instruct. Davenport was born in Gateshead on 31 May 1932. His father Tommy and grandfather William were killed in a domestic gas explosion before his first birthday. He grew up with his mother Sadie listening to Jack Armstrong's Northumbrian Barn Dance and Radio Athlone's Ceilidh Hour — turning the volume up so the Irish family upstairs could dance. That act of involuntary communal music-making may explain everything about him. He demobbed from RAF national service in 1953 and settled in London, drawn by jazz clubs, coffee bars, French films, and African music. The Camden pub circuit introduced him to Irish fiddle player Michael Gorman and singer Margaret Barry, and he recognised in their music the sounds from his childhood. He was recruited to sing one night by members of a London gang who'd heard he had a voice — an anecdote he told without apparent terror, which tells you something about his temperament. From Barry he learned The Blarney Stone and The Star of the County Down. In 1958 he fell in with the Rakes — Reg Hall, Michael Plunkett, and Paul Gross — and they ran a club at the Fox in Islington from 1964 that booked Greek Cypriot musicians, Ravi Shankar, and New Orleans jazz trumpeter Kid Sheik. That was his folk club. In 1963, Pete Seeger recommended him for the Newport Folk Festival, where he shared a stage with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. He already knew Dylan from London the previous year; his singing of the traditional song Nottamun Town is reputedly a source for Dylan's tune for Masters of War. He sang at the Smithsonian in 1967 and at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Canada. In the 1980s, Dylan apparently made an incognito visit to the club Davenport was running at the Empress of Russia pub in Islington. None of this made him famous in any conventional sense. He never made a living from music. He worked for the Post Office, recovered from tuberculosis, worked in a bookshop, took a sculpture degree at St Martin's School of Art, taught sculpture, ran a record shop, and ended his working life as a chauffeur — for the Guardian, as it happens. His recordings include The Iron Muse (1963), Farewell Nancy (1964), Down the Long Road (1975), Postcards Home (1977), and later The Red Haired Lad (1997) and The Common Stone (2004), the latter featuring Richard Thompson and Martin Carthy. He performed Sunny Afternoon after singing with Ray Davies at the Sunderland Empire in 1969. Bessie Smith, Bob Marley, and Byker Hill lived in the same repertoire without tension. Asked some years ago whether he had retired from the folk scene, he replied: 'I never joined it in the first place.' He was married three times — to Erica Hay (1958), Margaret Parker (1963), and Jean Oglesby (1978), who died in 2001. He is survived by five children: Fiona, Sarah, Joel, Ben, and Katharine.
