Sydney wrote ‘Lord Of The Dance’ in 1963, as an adaptation of the Shaker hymn ‘Simple Gifts’, which features in Aaron Copland’s ballet ‘Appalachian Spring’. Later, he said that he saw Christ as "the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ, I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other lords of the dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus."

‘Lord Of The Dance’ will continue to be sung worldwide long after its author is forgotten. To live on through his songs will indeed fulfil Sydney’s dreams.

Sydney was a folk poet, a holy sceptic and an iconoclastic theologian - that last description would both bemuse and please him - in the amateur tradition of the folk movement, deconstructing the theology of the academic establishment and bringing it to life. He played a leading role in the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s, and it was then that he wrote most of his songs, composed both to please and to shock. Life, as he embraced it, was for dancing.

From start to finish, he was a Londoner. He was born in Camden Town, and imbibed old English songs at Montem Street school in Islington. He loved community singing and later, as a bluecoat boy at Christ’s Hospital school in Horsham, West Sussex, he enjoyed the hymns in chapel - every day, and twice on Sunday. But he loved visits with his father to the Finsbury Park Empire just as much.

In the mid-1930s, Sydney read history at Balliol College, Oxford, where he also started to write poetry and dreamt of becoming a painter or film producer. After graduation, however, he ended up teaching at Frensham Heights school, in Farnham, Surrey - along with the novelist Rex Warner - until 1940.

With the second world war, his critical spirit and abhorrence of violence led him into the Friends Ambulance Unit, with which he served in the Middle East, and, in 1944, in Greece, along with a stimulating group of pacifists, including Donald Swann. If any church could come to holding Sydney’s allegiance, it was the Society of Friends, with its rejection of dogma, and its reliance on personal experience and social activism, and its affirmation of God’s presence in every human being.

After the war, folk music, both sacred and secular, took Sydney over. Much influenced by what he had heard in Greece, he studied its many forms; then, in 1952, he started writing lyrics for Swann, who needed revue material. "I found out that I could do that," Sydney said, "and get paid for it."

He launched what proved to be a long collaboration by providing lyrics for Swann’s composition ‘The Youth Of The Heart’, which featured in the Globe Revue in London’s West End. In the mid-1950s, he was the lyricist on Swann’s children’s musical, Lucy And The Hunter.

In 1962, Carter teamed up with Sheila Hancock for the album ‘Putting Out The Dustbin’, one track of which, ‘Last Cigarette’, on failing to give up smoking, became a minor hit. The songs on the LP were closer to cabaret than to folk, but the pacifist, political singer was there even then. In 1964, the Donald Swann EP, Songs Of Faith And Doubt, comprised six songs by Carter. In the 1960s too, he worked as a critic for Gramophone magazine.

But it was in 1965 that Sydney recorded his greatest success, the six-song EP, ‘Lord Of The Dance’, with Martin Carthy on guitar, the Johnny Scott Trio and the Mike Sammes singers. In the sleeve note, he cautions purchasers about the religious content, in case they should be misled by such earlier songs as ‘Down Below’ and ‘My Last Cigarette’.

Sydney treasured those who brought his texts to life, the whole folk scene, Carthy perhaps most of all, and singers like Nadia Cattouse. And they loved him. Across the years, many other musicians recorded his work, among them the Swingle Singers, Bob and Carole Pegg, Maddy Prior and Sarah-Jane Morris. His anti-war lullaby, ‘Crow On The Cradle’, was recorded in 1962 by Judy Collins, and, 17 years later, performed by Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and David Lindley at a No Nukes concert. It turned out to be an unexpected success; Warner Brothers bought the US rights and, many years later, Sydney was amazed to receive £9,000 in royalties.

When, in 1999 the mists of Alzheimer’s disease began to close in, Sydney’s second wife, Leela, lovingly cared for him and interpreted him to others. The past gradually receded into the strange land of lost memory. His friend Rabbi Lionel Blue wrote that now "our only contact is a thin thread of memory and his songs. I start singing them, and he joyfully joins in - and I leave him as he continues singing."

Leela survives him, as does their son Michael, a neurosurgeon.

Adapted from ‘The Guardian’

March 17, 2004