Duncan Williamson was one of the most celebrated storytellers in Scotland. His fame became international when he appeared at storytelling festivals in North America and Australasia and he published many books and recordings of his stories.

Duncan Williamson was born to a travelling family, “under a tree” as he told it, on the shores of Loch Fyne, near Furnace, Argyll, in 1928.

Life in a traveller's bow tent with 15 brothers and sisters was hard in the 1930s, and he would recall “sitting in school pure starving hungry” — so hungry he could not heed the teacher but he knew he had to sit there and put in the legal number of attendances or he would not have the real life of travelling the summer road in horse and wagon with his family. That road would take him to the community of pipers, ballad singers and storytellers that fed in him the passions that were to drive his entire life.

But it was closer to home that these passions began, from his father, uncles and two grannies.

“My wee granny was the best thing ever happened to me,” he recalled. His wee granny, Belle, 5ft 2inches tall, was a brilliant storyteller, and as a little boy he determined to be as good as she was. His big granny, 6ft 2in “like a warrior lady”, could stop a whole street with the power and beauty of her singing.

The course of his life was set. Travelling the road, working with shepherds, drystone dykers, berry-pickers, fisher folk, cattlemen, moving from the Western Islands to the East Coast harbour towns he gathered stories and stored them in the extraordinary library of his mind.

He left home equipped with two educations: the brief, strict curriculum of the Furnace School that, however, gave him a love of the great British poets, and the education from his family and the travelling people. By the age of 13 he could handle axe and cross-saw, build dykes, dig peats, survive on the fare of river, shore and countrysides, tell a story and sing a song. This life he would later describe in his autobiography, The Horsieman — Memories of a Traveller (1994).

As a young man he married a traveller-lass, Jean Townsley, and together with horse, wagon and tent they took to the road, taking work wherever he could find it.

In the early 1960s Williamson's life changed. He was “discovered” by the School of Scottish Studies and began to sing in Glasgow with the folk luminaries of the day.

After his wife died in 1971, he met another crusading spirit, Linda Hedley, an American student. She recorded his songs, became his wife and, living with him and their two children in the traveller's tent, discovered his huge repertoire of stories. She convinced him that they should be published, and in Stephanie Wolfe-Murray, of the publisher Canongate, they found an enthusiastic advocate. Fourteen books, a tiny morsel of his reputed 3,000 stories followed, and invitations flowed in from around the world.

It was in the telling of his stories that Williamson's genius glowed brightest. Hamish Henderson, the greatest Scottish folk-collector and himself a legendary figure, was quick to recognise his unique qualities of singer and storyteller: “Duncan Williamson,” he said, “is the Scottish folk traditions in one man.”

It was not Williamson's huge repertoire of story and song that made him one of the world's best-known storytellers, it was the sheer storm force of his being, a force that expressed itself in a tireless generosity, a lavish giving. The old Celtic saying says of the generosity of Finn McCool, “If the leaves of the trees were gold / And the waves of the sea silver / Finn would have given them all away”, and Williamson was his spiritual descendant. From Alaska to Australia pilgrims and story enthusiasts came to his ever-open door.

Where two or three were gathered together, for Williamson it was a ceilidh, a night-long feast of story and song. Even if it was only one stranger visiting, Williamson would give him or her his full intent attention, dispensing from his huge purse of tales and songs till the sun shone out of the morning.

For him a story was the greatest gift — “stories was wir education” — and he gave freely.

Williamson is survived by his wife, Linda, and his ten children.

Duncan Williamson, Scottish storyteller, was born on April 11, 1928. He died from the effects of a stroke on November 8, 2007, aged 79