In 2004, following two SwarbAid charity concerts by his Fairport Convention colleague Dave Pegg, Swarbrick received a double lung transplant and subsequently confounded both the press and medical profession by returning as a leading light on the British folk scene.

David Swarbrick was born at New Malden, Surrey, on April 5 1941. He was first drawn to folk music after taking up the guitar during the skiffle boom of the late 1950s. When he was 16, the pianist Beryl Marriott heard him at a skiffle event and invited him to join a ceilidh dance band. She also persuaded him to have another crack at the fiddle, which he had played as a child but which he had long since consigned to the attic.

In the 1960s Swarbrick was invited to play in some of the sessions of Ewan MacColl’s and Charles Parker’s Radio Ballads — setting stories about Britain’s fishermen, roadbuilders, miners, boxers and travellers to music. Through these he was introduced to Ian Campbell, a Scotsman who was turning his sights on the British folk tradition.

Swarbrick joined the Ian Campbell Folk Group in time to play on their first record, EP Ceilidh At The Crown (1962); he went on to help establish them as stars of the emerging folk club scene. The group had a minor hit with the first British cover of a Dylan song, The Times They Are A Changing. Swarbrick’s reputation rose rapidly, and in 1965 he was invited to play on Martin Carthy’s first album.

The next year he suddenly decided to emigrate to Denmark and marry his Danish girlfriend. With little money and no return ticket, he was detained at the Hook of Holland by customs, and promptly sent home again.

He ended up staying in London with Martin Carthy, with whom he went on to develop an important partnership. The intuitive interplay between Carthy’s guitar and Swarbrick’s fiddle was something entirely new. Their albums, Byker Hill (1967), But Two Came By (1968) and Prince Heathen (1969) broke the mould of traditional song arrangement and opened the door for the fusion of folk and rock.