Major folk artist - founded Pentangle. Nice obituary at The Guardian:
John Renbourn: ceaseless explorer of song – an appreciation
It wasn’t the sort of house where you could just drop in and say hi. The converted chapel on the Scottish borders that John Renbourn had called home for the past three decades was far away. Far from pretty much everywhere. And given how remote John’s house was – and that everything in it had got there by being carried along a 200-yard path via a narrow footbridge – it really was astonishing how much stuff there was in it. The 20 or so guitars. The bed in the corner of the large living space. The four or five record players dotted about the place. The thousands of records in the kitchen included an original copy of Lena Hughes – Queen of the Flat-Top Guitar, a privately pressed album of Appalachian folk instrumentals that numbered among his astonishingly diverse influences. The water supply came directly from the river. Mostly it worked, but sometimes, John would have to go outside and fix the pump. There were hundreds and hundreds of dusty tins and condiments, some of which may have dated back to the late 70s – after John moved here from the Oakland ghetto of San Francisco. “I was the only white guy in the neighbourhood,” he told me. “It was rough, but the kids would speak to me in an exaggerated version of what they thought was a 19th-century English accent.”
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