He was a founding member of The Young Tradition and also had a long solo career, recording numerous albums and touring folk clubs and concert halls.
He is noted for his ballad-opera The Transports,[2] and has been acknowledged as a major influence by performers of later generations including Damien Barber, Oli Steadman, and Jon Boden.
[3][4] Peter Bellamy was born in Bournemouth, England,[1] and spent his formative years in North Norfolk,[5] living in the village of Warham and attending Fakenham Grammar School in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
It drew heavily on the repertoire of Harry Cox, still alive at that time, who was the most famous traditional singer of Norfolk songs.
Although at folk clubs, and in private, he often accompanied blues on bottleneck guitar, these performances rarely appeared on his albums: an exception is an attenuated version of Robert Johnson's "Stones in My Passway", on the Young Tradition's Galleries.
He was struck by people's misconceptions about Kipling, who many perceived as (in Bellamy's words) "one of the reactionary old guard, and therefore obviously a writer of no merit whatsoever".
It has also been suggested that Kipling's "My name is O'Kelly, I've heard the reveille..." was written to the common Irish song and Army marching tune "Lillibullero".
The Barrack Room Ballads album was recorded by Bill Leader, with Chris Birch (brother of Bellamy's first wife) on fiddle and Tony Hall on melodeon.
Chris also contributed to numerous other Bellamy albums, playing fiddle and guitar, singing and providing vocal arrangements.
A tribute album Oak, Ash and Thorn comprising songs from Bellamy's Oak, Ash & Thorn and Merlin's Isle of Gramarye, was released in 2011, with contributions from artists including Jon Boden, Olivia Chaney, Charlie Parr, Fay Hield, Tim Eriksen, Trembling Bells, The Unthanks, Jackie Oates, Sam Lee, Lisa Knapp and The Owl Service.
Similarly from fellow folksinger Brian Peters: "The saddest Bellamy moment arose after I'd complimented him on a barnstorming performance the last time I'd seen him.
Shortly before his death, his widow, Jenny, later told Michael Grosvenor Myer, he had spent a whole day listening intently and self-critically to his entire record output, saying at the end "But I am good.
Karl Dallas's obituary published in The Independent concluded with the words: Though his roots were obvious to anyone with half an ear, he added much of himself to what he inherited, and was a giant in a world where the pygmy is the standard by which all must be measured.
It was unable to contain him, but now he is dead he will no doubt be consigned to the pantheon where the more threatening icons of our time can be tucked away safely, as relics of a past golden age.
His vast recorded output will be an inspiration to all who follow after.His life and work were fondly celebrated by a day of performances including The Transports at Conway Hall in London on 2 October 1992, 13 months after his death.
He has jocularly put on his website "Bellamists subscribe to a belief in the absolute purity and oneness of all things Bellamy, and bleat daily incantations in the hope of advancing the day when he will finally return to reign in ever-lasting glory."
In addition to the self-given sobriquet of "boring bleating old traddy", picked out in letters on a Scrabble board on a self-designed record-sleeve photograph by Valerie Grosvenor Myer and used, as noted above, as title of a Mudcat Cafe thread, and to the anagrammatic name attributed to the cartoon character based on him mentioned in the previous paragraph, he once rejoined to a Folk Review magazine correspondent, who had attributed to his influence a preponderance of (Toytown character) "Larry the Lamb" imitators in folk clubs, "Larry the Lamb imitations, dear Madam, are strictly my copyright!"