Fionna Duncan in full flow, her uncompromisingly gritty vocals suffused with natural swing, was not a sound to be easily forgotten, and she was as generous with her mentoring of younger singers and musicians as she was full-on in performance. After more than six decades of singing that included sharing stages with jazz greats, being complimented by Louis Armstrong and having the Beatles as an interlude band, Duncan, widely regarded as the first lady of Scottish jazz, has died at the age of 83.

The regard in which she was held was summed up in an appreciation from the online Scottish Jazz Archive: “A force of nature as a talented, gutsy and creative performer, Fionna was also tireless in her generosity of spirit towards the generations of young musicians that followed her... an ever-lasting lesson in how to be a truly world-class musician while indefatigably supporting all around her without judgement or prejudice.”

The daughter of marine engineer Andrew Duncan and his wife Agnes, Duncan was born in 1939 into a musical family. Her older brother and sister both played piano; Fionna didn’t, so took up singing – “I had to get my voice in somewhere because I talk a lot,” she would recall. Three years after her birth the family moved from their house at Portincaple on Loch Long to Glasgow’s King’s Park and thence to Rutherglen, while retaining the Portincaple house which would later become her home.

Fionna Duncan photographed in 2001 (Picture: Paul Graham)

She went on to attend Rutherglen Academy, a hotbed of the folk revival thanks to its Ballad and Blues Club established by Norman Buchan. A jazz-loving history teacher, sensing her interest, asked her parents’ permission to take her and her brother to see the formidable Scottish clarinettist Sandy Brown. It was the first live jazz she’d heard. “I was totally blown away by this man,” she recalled. By that point she’d been singing folk songs and light opera at school, but now she’d been severely bitten by the jazz bug.

She started appearing with local jazz bands then, while on a visit to the United States with her family, she made herself sufficiently heard to be offered a contract with the prestigious Riverside Records. It was, however, turned down as it would have meant living in the US. Back home, though, she was singing (and accompanying herself on ukulele) with the Joe Gordon Folk Four on TV’s popular Skiffle Club. Auditioning for the TV talent show Stars In Your Eyes, which she won, she met the clarinettist Forrie Cairns, who invited her into his All Stars. Cairns and Duncan were later recruited into the Clyde Valley Stompers, the hugely popular trad jazz outfit, with whom she made her first recording in 1959.

A JazzBeat Top Singer award followed and she toured the length and breadth of the UK with the Stompers. On one memorable occasion, in Bridlington, they played support for Louis Armstrong who, after hearing her, had her brought to his changing room. “I just wanted to see who was singing up a f***,” was how he complemented the somewhat alarmed 22-year-old, adding with a characteristic beam, “Nobody from Scotland should have a voice like that.” Another memorable encounter came when the Stompers played Liverpool’s Cavern Club and the “interlude band” turned out to be a newly emerging outfit, the Beatles.

Duncan had moved to London in the early 1960s, where she worked at the cold meats counter in Woolworths until a fortuitous encounter with producer John Kingdon got her into radio. She also spent some years as resident singer in a West End club. However, a major back injury put her in hospital for a year and on recovery she trained as a hairdresser – a career change that didn’t last, rather like her marriage in the mid-1970s to Stuart Harrison.

As she gradually returned to singing, her career expanded, performing with George Penman’s Jazzmen and a reformed Clyde Valley Stompers on both sides of the Atlantic. She also embarked on her lasting musical and domestic relationship, with double-bassist Ronnie Rae, with whom she went on in the mid-Eighties to establish her own trio along with Ronnie’s son, drummer John Rae, and pianist Brian Kellock.

After Mike Hart (with whose band she appeared at the Sacramento Jazz Festival) established the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, Duncan was frequently on the bill, finding herself joined by such jazz heroes as saxophonists Bud Freeman and Buddy Tate and Count Basie Orchestra trombonist Al Grey.

A trip to California introduced her to the benefits of singing workshops, a concept she developed back in Scotland, where her own workshops at Glasgow Jazz Festival provided invaluable, if stringent, mentoring to many would-be vocalists. She further encouraged emerging musicians through hosting the Glasgow festival’s late-night sessions or nurturing them at The Nest, the family home at Portincaple to which she and Ronnie had moved. In 2018, six decades after that first JazzBeat award, she was presented with a Lifetime Achievement accolade at the Scottish Jazz Awards, when she told Seonaid Aitken, presenter of BBC Radio Scotland’s Jazz Nights: “I didn’t want to be a star; I just wanted to sing.”

Living latterly in Pathhead, Midlothian, she finally succumbed to an aortic aneurysm on 6 December. Pianist and long-time accompanist to Duncan, Brian Kellock, gave a moving tribute to her during last month’s Scottish Jazz Awards. “I must have first met her about mid-Eighties, when she seemed the trad singer par excellence,” Kellock said, “but I soon found out that she wasn’t just that at all: she knew everything. She was a massive Billie Holiday fan, for instance. I got to know a lot of tunes and she knew all of them. She listened more than anything else. The song was the first thing, but she considered the band as a whole, it was never like the singer plus the trio. Everybody played a part and if you kept your ears open anything could happen – and lots of things did happen. It was great fun to be on a gig with her.”

Having emerged from a musical household, Fionna is survived by her partner, Ronnie Rae, her brother Iain and an extended and notably jazz-centric family.

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Scotsman Obituaries: Fionna Duncan, Scottish jazz singer who dazzled Louis Armstrong