James (Hamish) Scott Henderson was born on 11 November 1919 in Blairgowrie to a single mother who introduced him to folksong and brought him up to speak Gaelic. He was educated at Blairgowrie High School and Dulwich College, London, and studied modern languages at Cambridge. As a visiting student in Germany he acted as a courier for a Quaker network which helped refugees to escape the Nazi regime. He himself left Germany just before the outbreak of World War II.

He served as an intelligence officer in Europe and North Africa. From the experience of war came his poem sequence Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, which received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1947. A lifelong socialist, he used the prize money to travel to Italy to work on his translation of the Prison Letters of Antonio Gramsci, the philosopher and founder of the Italian Communist Party, though the work was not published for many years. It was a sensitive subject in Italy at the time and Henderson was asked to leave the country.

In 1951 he accompanied the American folklorist Alan Lomax on a collecting tour in Scotland, the beginning of an upsurge of interest in Scottish folk material and tradition. Henderson became a collector, and later a permanent member of staff with the newly-founded School of Scottish Studies in the University of Edinburgh. His particular field of activity for some years was with the ‘tinkers’ or travellers who gathered from all over Scotland each summer for the berry-picking at Blairgowrie. Henderson said that collecting in ‘the berryfields of Blair’ was like sitting under Niagara Falls with a tin can. Perhaps his greatest achievement, among many, was his discovery of the singer and storyteller Jeannie Robertson, the heir to generations of tradition.

Parallel to Henderson’s research ran his close involvement with the folk revival in Scotland, beginning with the Edinburgh People’s Festivals in the early 1950s. This ‘alternative’ event, organised by the Labour movement, was arguably a forerunner of the Fringe. Folk clubs sprang up and modern folk songs, often with a political message, became common currency, one of the most notable being Henderson’s ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’.

Henderson held several honorary degrees and after his retirement became an honorary fellow of the School of Scottish Studies. In 1983 he refused an OBE in protest at the nuclear arms policy of the Thatcher government. He died in Edinburgh on 8 March 2002, survived by his wife Kätzel and their two daughters.