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Obituary
Johnny Collins
Performer of sea songs and shanties with an international following

Derek Schofield The Guardian, Monday 13 July 2009

Best known as a singer of maritime songs and sea shanties, Johnny Collins, who has died aged 71 of a heart attack, had a full repertoire of folk songs, with a particular emphasis on songs with a chorus. In the style of the great American folk singer Pete Seeger, Johnny loved to have the audience sing the choruses with him. But they had to sing loudly to be heard above Johnny's strong, booming, bass voice.

A frequent performer on mainland Europe, where sea songs and shanties in a variety of languages are very popular, Johnny achieved his greatest triumph in 1983 when he and his frequent singing partner Jim Mageean won an eastern European version of the Eurovision song contest - the Intervision song contest - staged in Rostock, East Germany. Other competitors made full use of the 96-piece orchestra, but Jim and Johnny won the hearts of the voting audience with a medley of unaccompanied sea shanties.

Born in Norfolk, Johnny was adopted by a Belfast-born railwayman and his wife, a music teacher from Norwich. He left school at 16 and two years later joined the army - at first the Royal Engineers, but then transferring to the Royal Army Medical Corps. Stationed in London in 1958, he came across the jazz and folk clubs of the West End, learned to play the guitar, and sang alongside the jazz guitarist Diz Disley, folk singers Martin Winsor, Redd Sullivan and Alex Campbell, and the blues singer Long John Baldry.

By the time Johnny was posted to Singapore in 1959, he was listening to the American folk songs of the Weavers, Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie, but back in Catterick, Yorkshire, he met Tony Foxworthy, a staff member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, who introduced him to English folk song. At his next posting in Hong Kong, Johnny ran a folk club and sold out the City Hall with his new folk group.

Leaving the army in 1968, Johnny was encouraged in his singing career by the folk singers Dave Burland, Roy Harris and Derek Elliott. Folk club fees did not allow Johnny to become fully professional, and he became chief laboratory technician at Watford hospital.

By the mid-seventies, he had built an enviable reputation and released two albums, Traveller's Rest (1973) and Johnny's Private Army (1975). In Watford he was soon singing with Mageean. Concentrating on sea songs, they appeared at most British folk festivals, and together released albums, including Coming of Age (1996) and, with Graeme Knights, Good Times (2008). There were also solo recordings - Pedlar of Songs (1993) and Now and Then (2000).

Through the 1980s and into the 90s, Johnny performed at many of the world's maritime festivals. In the US, he sang at the Maine and Newport maritime museums, as well as the Kendall Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, and the prestigious Mystic Seaport festival in Connecticut. He was the resident shantyman at Expo 88 in Brisbane, Australia, and for more than 20 years, was the main guest at the maritime festival in Workum, the Netherlands. In 1987, Johnny was invited by the East German government to the Berlin Shanty Festival (an unlikely event for a land-locked city) to celebrate Berlin's 750th anniversary. Other festival appearances were in Belgium, Poland and France.

Johnny sang at the music events that accompanied the Cutty Sark Tall Ships races in Liverpool, Newcastle upon Tyne and Southampton, and he was a regular at maritime festivals in Hull, Lancaster, Portsmouth and Greenwich. A core of British folk festivals continued to welcome Johnny's brand of chorus singing, and he was a frequent guest at festivals in Bromyard and Chippenham, where his enthusiasm for folk song was widely appreciated.

He is survived by his partner, Joyce Squires, and two children, Carol and Michael from an earlier marriage.

• John Robert Collins, folk singer, born 10 May 1938, died 6 July 2009