There has always been in Ulster a breed of Protestants who, in the words of the poet Seamus Heaney, are at ease with a sense of Ireland and Irishness. One of these was the singer and documentary film-maker David Hammond, who died last week at the age of 79.

Hammond was an original. But he was also an archetype. While so many of his co-religionists spent the 1960s and beyond engaged in open warfare with their Catholic and nationalist fellow countrymen, Hammond followed his own path, empathising with both communities but only ever taking the side of the combatants’ shared humanity. He loved Ireland and all its people — especially their song. But most of all he loved Ulster, that curious hybrid of gaelic culture, Scottish influence and English dominance.

To Hammond, the “Troubles” that broke out in the North in 1968 were a particularly ugly tragedy. He liked listening to singers and storytellers. He took delight in “Orange” songs, with their strong, direct narrative element, and appreciated both the sound and the significance of Lambeg drummers, whose enormous drums sent out a warning to Catholics that Ulster was British and would remain so even at the cost of human lives. But the Presbyterian singer, born of a Derry father and an Antrim mother, could also lose himself in the mellifluous music of the Irish pipes, the bodhran and the fiddle, which represented to him an instinct to survive that would not easily be extinguished. He thus found himself caught between two opposing impulses, and in the space between made his own indelible contribution.

He had a light voice, with a lilt to it, and invariably accompanied himself on the guitar. His repertoire was deep and long, extending across the full range of music alive in Ireland and down the centuries, most obviously in the period of the industrial revolution, when Belfast and Derry rang to the sound of hammers, looms and threshers. At the drop of a hat — and he wore a succession of fedoras, flat caps and trilbys — he would pick up his guitar and launch into a version of The 23rd of June or a Belfast street song from Victorian times.

There can be few traditional musicians in any part of Ireland who did not know of Hammond and his work. He was an indomitable spirit, travelling relentlessly, dropping into music pubs and farmhouses, where he joined with relish into whatever revelry was going on, collecting new songs and introducing his audiences to old favourites of his own, some of them obscure and formerly half-forgotten.

He brought the same enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge to his film-making, carried out initially for the BBC in Belfast, then later as a freelance, contributing to both RTE in Dublin and Channel 4 in the UK. He made many films. He interviewed a host of artists, musicians and writers, including Yehudi Menuhin and Stéphane Grappelli, and explored the nature of song and popular culture in a long series of documentaries, from the groundbreaking Dusty Bluebells — a celebration of Belfast childhood — to A Space for Dreaming, in which he eulogised the life and achievement of the great Welsh folklorist and lover of Ulster Professor E. Estyn Evans.

Recognition of his talent came early and continued late. He won many awards and accolades. In 2004, at the age of 75, he received an honorary doctorate from Dublin City University — bursting into song when asked to make a speech — and in the same year was commissioned by the BBC to make what became his valedictory, a series of six documentaries under the title David Hammond’s Ireland.

Born in 1928, only seven years after the division of Ireland, he grew up in Belfast, where his father had taken a job as a tram driver. He attended school at Methodist College — then, as now, one of the finest grammar schools in these islands — and went on to train as a teacher at Stranmillis College, now part of Queen’s University.

For a while he earned a living as a teacher, working under the liberal and reform-minded John Malone at Orangefield School, in the east of the city, whose alumni include the hostage and writer Brian Keenan, the singer-songwriter Van Morrison and the terrorist Ronnie Bunting — the man who, as operational commander of the Irish National Liberation Army, masterminded the assassination of the war hero and Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Airey Neave in March 1979.

Hammond was a whirlwind of a teacher, his voice echoing down the corridors, punctuated by snarls and laughter. While he did not, unlike the majority of his colleagues, countenance physical punishment, he did not suffer fools gladly, imprisoning persistent troublemakers in a set of specially made stocks known as “the block”. He joined the education department of BBC Northern Ireland in 1964, and quickly discovered a film-making talent. He developed close friendships with musicians, writers and artists across Ireland, most obviously with Heaney, with whom he had a close affinity. The Singer’s House, a poem dedicated to Hammond, was much appreciated, as were relationships with the folksinger Tommy Makem and the poet Michael Longley.

Hammond lived in Belfast but was most at home in his cottage in Dooey, in southwest Donegal, where he held court with his wife, Catherine, whom he married in 1952, and his four children. He had been ill for some time but was still developing fresh ideas and new enthusiasms. He is survived by his wife, three daughters and a son.

David Hammond, singer and documentary film-maker, was born on October 5, 1928. He died on August 25, 2008, aged 79