My friend Doug Adams, who has died of cancer aged 60, was the lead musician at the Deptford Jack in the Green. This traditional event, last seen in Deptford around the end of the 19th century, was revived in the early 1980s. The Jack in the Green, a large leaf-covered framework decorated with flowers, is carried through the streets on May Day, accompanied by a band of attendants and musicians. Doug also played melodeon for several morris teams in south-east London as well as leading bands and playing at English traditional music sessions.
Originally from Bratton Clovelly, Devon, Doug arrived in Greenwich in the mid-1970s after taking an applied physics degree at Lanchester Polytechnic (now Coventry University). He had a love of English traditional music which, at the time he started playing, was not as well known as Irish traditional music.
Doug had learned piano and recorder as a child, then switched to piano accordion and finally the melodeon. It was as a melodeon player that he joined his first morris team, Greenwich Morris Men, in the late 1970s. While pursuing his other great interest at the time, re-enacting civil war battles with the Roundhead Association, he broke his leg very badly, but continued as a musician, first using a wheelchair and then on crutches.
Doug then joined Blackheath Morris Men and gradually became their main musician. One of their enterprises in the early 1980s involved the revival of the Deptford Jack in the Green for which Doug was musician on the first and then most of the subsequent outings on May Day each year including 2012. Doug played regularly at English music sessions at the Horseshoe Inn, near London Bridge, and the Lord Hood in Greenwich as well as at the Sidmouth and Dartmoor folk festivals.
Doug worked at the fire safety company AFA Minerva and at British Gas as a statistician and national energy officer, before a career change following the award of an MSc with distinction in energy engineering from London South Bank University. Since 2000, he had been an energy management consultant with the Atkins group.
His current band was the Pigeon English Band, a house band at the Musical Traditions Club, held at the King and Queen pub in Fitzrovia, London.
He is survived by his brother, Bruce, and nieces, Helen and Claire.