Obituary: Archie Fisher, Scottish folk music luminary

Fisher hailed from a musical family, performing initially in a duo with his sister Ray. He made his mark in both the Glasgow and Edinburgh folk communities alongside peers including Billy Connolly, Bert Jansch and Phil Cunningham and established artistic partnerships with artists from England, Ireland, the US and Canada across a career which spanned seven decades.

Fisher was noted as a gifted guitarist. Alongside Martin Carthy and Davey Graham, he was one of the early folk adopters of the steel string guitar, developing alternative tunings and a distinctive picking style. In the Sixties, he became the go-to guitar teacher at fabled Edinburgh folk venue The Howff, where a young Bert Jansch worked (and kipped) as a janitor. Eager to learn from the more experienced Fisher, he sought out his tuition. Fisher would later play down his role in instructing the most influential Scottish guitarist of all time but it was jokingly said that it had only taken the precocious Jansch two lessons to learn all that Fisher could teach him. Fisher claimed they could have done it all in one sitting if they hadn’t opted to spend their first lesson in the pub.

He received his own education in folk music from listening to US vocal ensemble The Weavers. Alive to folk and blues traditions from around the world, he began writing his own songs, first by adapting fragments of existing folk repertoire and then by penning topical songs to order for performance (with Ray) on STV’s news magazine show Here and Now. He sang with gentle authority about ordinary working lives, beautifully documenting the Clydeside shipbuilding industry in the ballad The Shipyard’s Apprentice and the nefarious siren call to abandon fishing and farming for shiny new industry in Men o’ Worth and shanty lament The Final Trawl.

Stalwart in his advocacy of the Scottish folk scene and beyond, he presented Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk show for 27 years, from 1983 to his retirement in 2010, but never stopped recording and performing, celebrating his 80th birthday with a Celtic Connections concert.

He was born Archibald Macdonald Fisher, a second child with six sisters including Ray and Cilla, also a singer. His father John was an avowed light opera fan and sang in the City of Glasgow Police Choir, while his mother Morag hailed from Vatersay and introduced Gaelic song to the Fisher household.

He attended Hyndland Secondary School, where he first met a hustling Hamish Imlach, who asked him if he wanted to buy a lighter. Following time in the Merchant Navy, he returned to Glasgow, guitar in hand, to go on early musical manoeuvres with a band of singers at the Glasgow Folk Club who were dubbed the Broomhill Bums because they would gather and rehearse at Imlach’s Broomhill abode. Two of the Bums (history does not record which) were once arrested for running an illicit still, busted when a young lad stole and imbibed their particularly potent poteen and was hospitalised with its ill effects.

Fisher dropped out of agricultural college and moved to Edinburgh in 1960. Encouraged by Glasgow schoolteacher, future Labour MP and all-round folk maven Norman Buchan, he and Ray recorded Far Over the Forth, an EP of traditional songs, for Topic Records. In the mid-Sixties, they performed as The Fisher Family with Cilla and her husband Artie Tresize, who went on to form The Singing Kettle. A solo Fisher featured on the Decca Records’ compilations Edinburgh Folk Festival Vol 1 and 2 alongside other luminaries of the scene, including Matt McGinn, Dolina McLellan and a couple of young bucks called Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson who were to form the Incredible String Band at the long gone Crown Bar on Lothian Street, where Fisher was promoter.

Around this time, he also mentored a young Barbara Dickson. The pair recorded two albums, The Fate O’ Charlie and Thro’ the Recent Years, in the late Sixties. Fisher also released his eponymous debut album in 1968 and followed up in 1970 with Orfeo, his first album of original songs, with co-writing contributions from Rab Noakes and Edwin Morgan and backing vocals from Dickson.

His own catalogue was sporadic but throughout the Seventies and Eighties he performed with and produced folk albums for Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy of the Clancy Brothers, recorded with US folk legend Tom Paxton and partnered with Canadian singer/songwriter Garnet Rogers. He toured the US in the Nineties with Jansch and fellow Pentangle guitarist John Renbourn and released his final albums, Windward Away and A Silent Song, in 2008 and 2015 respectively.

He was inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame and received an MBE in 2006 for services to folk music, all the while continuing to write and perform, In 2011, he collaborated with Glasgow indie band Frightened Rabbit on their track The Work. The band’s late singer Scott Hutchison said of Fisher: “He’s a real Scottish legend, and my mum and dad couldn’t believe I was singing with one of their heroes. When I listen to this one, I think of the great day I spent at his house, mulling over the tune and listening to all his hilarious stories.”

Fisher is survived by his children Cindy, Aileen, Andrea, Rebecca and Rhys, three grandchildren, sisters Cilla, Audrey and Joyce and his long-term partner Stephanie Tristam.

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