PETER KENNEDY, nicknamed “Mr Folk”, was a lifelong collector of, and enthusiast for, all things to do with the folk music of the British Isles and beyond. He was a writer, performer, archivist and film-maker, model-maker, teacher, publisher, and broadcaster on radio and television. He was still regularly playing the melodeon with his band, the Hooleys, until six months before his death.

Kennedy came from a family steeped in folk song and dance. His father, Douglas, was president of the Folklore Society and of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) and his mother, Helen, was its first secretary. Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser, who made pioneering recordings of folk music — which she published as The Songs of the Hebrides — was his great-aunt.

Kennedy was born in 1922 and educated at Abinger Hill prep school in Surrey, and at the Society of Friends’ Leighton Park School, Reading. After his brother, John, was killed while serving in the Navy, he joined RAF Intelligence as a topographical model-maker. He helped to produce the models for the Dam Busters raid on the Ruhr, and later served in North Africa and Italy.

After the war, he trained with the EFDSS and became area organiser for the North East, but he soon found that there was interesting folk song and dance in the area that was not being promoted by the society. He began to collect dances, songs, fiddle tunes, dialect and customs. His work showed that folk was a living tradition that needed support, and this continued when he went to work for EFDSS in the South West.

In 1952 he began to work for the BBC in Bristol. He made programmes for radio and television, including As I Roved Out, and Song Hunter with David Attenborough and Alan Lomax. He and the Irish collector Seamus Ennis were then asked by the BBC to record traditional singers all over Britain. Those recordings sowed the seeds for his award-winning book Folk Songs of Britain and Ireland (1975). The dance and music material he collected also went into other publications that had a significant impact on the folk revival.

In the 1950s and 1960s he recorded many traditional singers and made recordings for EMI and EFDSS, including Bert Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, the Ian Campbell Folk Group, and countless folk dance records. He also filmed traditional customs all over Britain, such as the Padstow ’Obby ’Oss.

For the EFDSS Kennedy organised the London Folk Festivals, and in 1965 was one of the instigators of the National Folk Music Festival at Keele. Throughout this period he brought many traditional singers and musicians to the fore alongside the revival singers, and he is considered to be the originator of the contemporary English ceilidh.

His relationship with the EFDSS was never easy and he left it in 1967.

He later met his wife, Beryl, and they went to Dartington College of Arts, in Devon, where he founded the Institute of Folklore Studies, a degree in folk studies, and FolkTrax, initially to provide students with recordings of source singers.

He moved to Bristol, to help with the start of the Watershed arts centre and cinema, and then to Gloucester, where he expanded his role as an archivist, making his collections accessible to a new generation.

FolkTrax has grown to cover a wide range of material and provides an important service to media organisations, academics, musicians and singers. Of all his achievements, Kennedy was proudest of his role in communicating folk music and lore and in making his archives available to all.

The fiddler and academic Reg Hall, who played with Kennedy in the ceilidh revival, said: “Many might say that Alan Lomax, Hamish Henderson, Seamus Ennis and Sean O’Boyle are the big names in the field, and Peter worked with them all.”

The American musician and writer Jack Feerink said that Kennedy was “probably the single greatest preserver of the Anglo-Irish folk tradition. This is not to take anything from the work of Child, Sharp, Baring-Gould et al, but they were Victorians, and had an unfortunate tendency to ‘pretty things up’. It took sound recording technology to capture the language ‘as she is spoke’, and it took the vision of Peter Kennedy to apply that technology on such a huge scale.”

Kennedy’s accomplishment is indeed immense; but for him our understanding of the traditions of these islands would be much poorer. Few can claim to have done more for the folk traditions of Britain and Ireland.

Kennedy is survived by his wife, their son and two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage.

Peter Kennedy, collector and promoter of folk music, was born on November 18, 1922. He died on June 10, 2006, aged 83.