One of the most popular British folk groups, the Spinners’ easy-going, middle-of-the-road style made them staples of the BBC’s light entertainment schedule and earned them their own television and radio shows. But although their easy-listening sound was often criticised as bland, they were at the same time trailblazers, one of the first multicultural groups in British popular music, because of the presence of the Caribbean-born guitarist and harmonica player, Cliff Hall.

Born in Oriente Pourice, Cuba, 1925, to Jamaican parents, he was brought up in Jamaica and came to Britain at the age of 17 to enlist in the RAF. After war service, he moved to Merseyside and worked on Liverpool building sites. In the late 1950s he met fellow musician and labourer Tony Davis and together with Mick Groves and Hughie Jones, who were both active on the same Liverpool skiffle scene that produced the Beatles, they formed the Spinners.

From skiffle, several musical avenues opened. One road — famously followed by the Beatles — led to rock’n’roll. Another route led to folk music and in 1958, just as the Quarrymen (as the Beatles were still known) were turning from a skiffle outfit into an amplified beat group and playing their first gigs at the Cavern, the Spinners started a Liverpool folk club. The group ran it collectively for the next 25 years and it still operates today, under different management, as the Triton folk club.

Often augmented by the double bass of John McCormick, who also became the group’s musical director, their initial repertoire mostly consisted of the same American folk songs that had driven the skiffle movement.

However, prompted by Redd Sullivan, a seaman with a love of shanties and old ballads, the group soon developed a strong repertoire of traditional English folk songs.

This attracted the attention of the London-based folk scene, and Bill Leader from Topic Records, Britain’s leading folk label, travelled to the Liverpool club to record the live album, Songs Spun in Liverpool. The Spinners also began to play regularly in London at clubs such as the Troubadour and at Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance & Song Society. In 1962 Peter Kennedy, of the EFDSS, recorded an album by the Spinners called Quayside Songs Old and New and in 1963 they were signed by Philips on a four-year recording contract, which enabled them to turn professional.

Over the next eight years they recorded eight albums and countless singles for Philips, mixing traditional songs with their own folk-styled compositions, usually by Hughie Jones. Several of the story-telling ballads he wrote for the Spinners, such as The Ellan Vanin Tragedy, The Marco Polo and The Fairlie Duplex Engine have since become folk standards, while Hall introduced Jamaican songs to the group’s repertoire. Although they remained loyal to the folk club scene, by the end of the 1960s the Spinners were selling out leading concert venues such as the London Palladium and their clean-cut image made them TV and radio favourites.

They became regulars on BBC One’s Barndance, often appeared on children’s television and family entertainment shows such as Morecambe and Wise. In 1970 they were given their own series on BBC One, which ran for seven years. They had their own radio show on BBC Radio 2 and their own BBC television Christmas special which ran until 1985. They also toured the world, and to Hall’s satisfaction visited West Africa several times to play concerts in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Senegal.

After signing to EMI in the early 1970s the Spinners continued to record prolifically. They were now firmly entrenched as family entertainers, and albums of Christmas carols and other similarly populist fare did little to endear them to the more purist elements of the folk scene. Yet the group took the odd brickbat that came its way with unfailing good humour: they even cheekily named one of their albums Not Quite Folk.

Having kept the same stable line-up for 30 years, the Spinners finally announced their retirement from full-time performing in 1988, although there were subsequently a number of comeback appearances. They proudly accepted an invitation to lead the community singing at the all-Merseyside FA Cup Final in 1989 and re-formed for a series of Christmas shows in the early 1990s.

Hall, who was by several years the oldest member of the group, eventually retired to Australia. He is survived by his third wife, Dottie.

Cliff Hall, musician, was born on September 11, 1925. He died on June 26, 2008, aged 82