My Music

Description

Kate Rusby, sometimes known as the Barnsley Nightingale, is one of the most important contemporary British folk singers. Drawing from both contemporary and traditional sources, her material is so charming and guileless that she has become one of the few performers within the folk idiom who has transcended it and become far more than a folk singer. Born into a musical family in Sheffield in 1973, after becoming proficient on a number of instruments including the guitar, the fiddle and the piano, as well as honing her natural talent as a singer, she played in many local folk festivals as a child and teenager before joining (and becoming the lead vocalist of) the all-female Celtic folk band The Poozies. They recorded one EP and an album together before Kate left to concentrate on her burgeoning solo career. Together with fellow Barnsley songstrel Kathryn Roberts she released an album called simply Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts, which two years later, was followed by her debut solo album Hourglass. Over the next fifteen years Kate became a British folk institution. Perhaps the most telling tribute to her was in 2012 when Island Records reinstated their legendary pink label, home of such musical luminaries as Fairport Convention, Dr Strangely Strange and Nick Drake, for Kate’s album 20. It was a telling moment, because Kate has become as important to the current era of this music, which is larger and more important than just folk music, but which despite its commercial and cultural success retains the humility and humanity of ‘the people’s music’, as the aforementioned acts were in previous eras.