Ray Fisher Folksinger 1940 – 2011

Ray Fisher, folksinger. Born: 26 November, 1940, in Glasgow. Died: 31 August, 2011, in North Shields, Tyne and Wear, aged 70.

Along with her elder brother Archie, Ray Fisher was one of the “Glasgow boys and girls” in the vanguard of the UK folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She became perhaps the best-known Scots folksinger of her generation, not only in her homeland but south of the Border and among the Scots diaspora worldwide.

Having started in a 1950s skiffle group with her brother, she joined him in a folk duo – Ray and Archie Fisher – her bespectacled face becoming well-known on numerous TV programmes including the BBC’s Hootenanny and STV’s Here and Now, presented by Bill Tennent. She was also part of the trio The Wayfarers along with Archie and singer/fiddler Bobby Campbell.

Ray and Archie also recorded as the Fisher Family, along with their parents, their young sister Cilla and later Cilla’s husband Artie Trezise. Cilla and Artie later became part of the popular Singing Kettle group while Ray and Archie each went solo.

It was during a solo gig at the Bridge Folk Club in Newcastle in the early 1960s that Ray met English folk musician Colin Ross, the club’s founder, a fiddler and piper who became one of the creators of the modern Scottish smallpipes, including the breakthrough standardisation of bagpipe hole spacings and reeds.

They married in 1962. Fisher guested with Ross in his group the High Level Ranters, playing the traditional music of the Borders, and she settled in his native North Shields area for the rest of her life. She nevertheless remained a passionate ambassador for Scots’ folk music and the ballad tradition, toured the world, giving gigs from Canada to Hong Kong to New Zealand, wherever there were congregations of homesick Scots.

She also returned regularly to take part in the Edinburgh Festival, where, as early as 1963-64, she had sung on the classic albums Edinburgh Folk Festival volumes one and two, released by Decca, joining Archie in Whiskey in the Jar on the first volume .

Offstage, Fisher was a feisty fighter against nuclear weapons housed in Scotland, angry that Scottish people and her beloved landscape could be the first target of the then Soviet union, or any rogue nuclear state or terrorist group with a grievance against the US. She marched against the presence of American nuclear submarines at the Holy Loch and was a regular at the peace camp outside the Trident base at Faslane on the Gare Loch.

Ray Fisher was born “in the shadow of the Fairfield Crane” by the river Clyde in Glasgow on 26 November, 1940, one of six sisters with one brother, Archie. She was only 15 weeks old when Clydeside was devastated by the Luftwaffe in March 1941.

Her father was a soloist in the City of Glasgow Police Choir while her mother, a Gaelic-speaker from Vatersay, instilled in her a love for traditional ballads and stories handed down by word of mouth.

Along with Archie, Ray became drawn to the new 50s craze, skiffle, headed by her fellow Glaswegian Lonnie Donegan. Archie then “discovered” politically-motivated American singers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, while Ray became highly-influenced by both the powerful voice and the outspoken leftist sympathies of Ronnie Gilbert, who sang with Seeger in one of the huge folk groups of the 1960s, the Weavers. (Years later, one of Ray’s greatest thrills was to back Woody Guthrie’s famous war buddy, soulmate and harmoniser Cisco Houston in a gig at Glasgow’s Berkeley Hall).

When Ray was still in her late teens, Archie took her to what had become known as the Ballads Club, run by a folk music-loving teacher at Rutherglen Academy in Glasgow. His name was Norman Buchan and he would go on to become Labour MP for West Renfrewshire, and later Paisley South, for more than half a century until his death in 1990.