In 1950s Camden Town, people used to say you could find the Bedford Arms from the Tube station without directions: you simply followed the sound of Bob Davenport and Margaret Barry singing. Davenport, the Gateshead-born singer whose rough, room-filling voice carried the songs of Tyneside through half a century of the British folk revival, died in September 2026. He was 94.

Word of his death travelled first through the folk world, and Chimeo marked it with a long tribute. The broadcaster Mike Harding, a friend since the early days of the revival, wrote that he "was a singer and a fighter in the Woody Guthrie mould." Both halves of that were earned. For more than 50 years Davenport held to one conviction with rare stubbornness: that the old songs were the property of working people, and ought to be sung the way working people sang them.

That conviction had its roots in Gateshead, where he was born Robert H. Davenport in 1932. At ten months old he survived a gas explosion that destroyed the family home and killed his father, Tommy, who was 23, and his grandfather. "I was 10 months old when my dad was killed. It was an explosion which became a local cause celebre," he told The Journal in 2010, recalling that the town corporation and the gas company had argued over who was at fault. His mother brought him up with help from her own family, and at seven he was evacuated to Yorkshire.

Music filled the house. "Singing was an important pastime," he said of a childhood spent in the Depression-hit North East. "There was often singing at weddings and funerals." His mother bought a radio and the family tuned in to Radio Athlone, while the Irish neighbours upstairs followed its Ceilidh Hour. "You could hear them dancing about upstairs," he told the Camden New Journal in 2008.

That radio turned out to be a map. After National Service in the RAF he moved to London in 1953 to work for the Post Office, and before long he walked into the Bedford Arms. "I walked into the Bedford Arms and there was this Radio Athlone Ceilidh Hour, but played live," he said. "It was amazing and it quickly became part of my life." The resident band, with Margaret Barry and the fiddler Michael Gorman, invited him up, and he sang "The Star of the County Down." Soon someone who heard him put him forward for a competition. "From then I entered the folk world," he said. He studied at St Martin's, worked for a publisher on Charlotte Street, and sang in Soho too, at the Skiffle Cellar on Greek Street, where his three-piece split 30 bob between them, ten shillings each, "which was good money."

Camden's Irish music never crowded the North East out of his singing. His great partnership was with the Rakes, the dance band of Reg Hall, Michael Plunkett and Paul Gross. His first record, Geordie Songs, appeared in 1959, and for decades he took pieces such as "Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinnie" and "The Jarrow Shipbuilder" into rooms a long way from the Tyne. He once recalled being told, after a night singing at a club, that "practically every song was about leaving, dying or being exiled from your homeland."

The reputation crossed the Atlantic. Around 1962 a young Bob Dylan, on his first visit to London, was learning from Davenport and Martin Carthy as he soaked up the British traditional repertoire. In 1963 Pete Seeger invited Davenport to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, where he appeared alongside Dylan and Joan Baez. Decades later he described a lunchtime session with Dylan and two traditional musicians, footage of which he only came across on BBC Four: "We would do a song each and go round like that."

The purest expression of that conviction, though, was the folk club. In 1964 three Islington locals asked him and Reg Hall to be the residents of a new club at The Fox on Islington Green. The pair had little time for the folk clubs they knew and agreed only on condition that they could run this one their own way, with the Rakes as house band, according to the Islington Folk Club's own history. He stayed as resident singer until 1967, then returned in the late 1970s as resident singer with the band Flowers & Frolics, and later shared the booking of guests until the club closed in 1986. His standard came from his grandfather. "My grandfather used to say, 'Keep the kettle boiling' and what he meant by that was don't let things sag," he told The Journal. "When I came to MC at two pubs in Islington, I tried to keep the standards up." Ken Lees, who restarted the club in 1972, put the debt plainly: "There have been three separate clubs all calling themselves The Islington Folk Club. But without Bob Davenport and The Rakes at The Fox, none of the rest would have happened."

On record he mixed eras without apology. Down the Long Road set him among Irish musicians including Lucy Farr and Jimmy Power. Postcards Home, in 1977, worked through hard times and war by threading songs by Richard Thompson and Bob Marley among traditional pieces, poetry and music-hall numbers. He wrote songs of his own as well, among them "Wild, Wild Whiskey," about people far from home in Camden Town, scraping a living while trying to dodge the traps of its pubs. Topic, his label, credited him as an influence on artists as different as Richard Thompson and Ray Davies.

In 2004 came The Common Stone, which he dedicated to his father, Tommy. Its guests included Richard and Linda Thompson, Martin Carthy, Mike and Norma Waterson, John Tams and Chumbawamba, and MOJO named it one of its folk albums of the year. Six years later, at 78, he was brought home to The Sage Gateshead by the Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell, for a concert in which she was to accompany him on fiddle. He planned to pair the ballad "Young Edmund in the Lowlands Low" with a reading from Albert Camus's The Outsider, which tells the same story, and he was exact about the territory: "My North East, by the way, is Durham and Northumberland."

What he kept boiling can still be heard. It is there in the 1959 Geordie Songs EP, in the Topic albums with the Rakes, in the record he made with the Marsden Rattlers, and in The Common Stone. It is there in the Islington Folk Club, whose own history credits the principles he established with shaping its atmosphere. And it is there in every singer who learned a Tyneside song from one of his records and sang it back the way he believed such songs should go: rough at the edges, full of wit, and belonging to the people who first made them.