Make You Sing: Kate Rusby

Posted by yseult on Mar 5, 2009 in Personal, Soulfood | 1 comment

One of my big loves and heartaches at the same time is any kind of irish or celtic music. Heartaches because one of my unaccomplished dreams was to learn the Irish Harp and play the flute or Ullean Pipes in a pub somewhere in the backland of Donegal. Sounds like your average point on a list of things you’d like to do before you die. A bucket list of sorts. The longing in my case however takes on dimensions that can border on the tag of ‘unrequited love’.

Apart from one of my favourite Podcasts, the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast I satisfy my longing and dreams with quite a few folk and irish artists. Of course there are the well known ones such as Enya, Clannad, Loreena McKennitt or even Moya Brennan and Aiofé that quite often make it into the bill board charts – particularly around Christmas – there are some that offer a heartfelt new interpretation of the Irish theme to the lover of such music.

One name that is not so widely known is Kate Rusby. Even if The Guardian and other English Newspapers declared her the most well known folk singers of our times, outside of the UK barely anybody has ever heard of her.
And even if such well known names as John McCusker (who later became her husband) show the level of her work and brilliance in her tone and writing, outside of the folk scene, not one song of her was ever featured anywhere else but on the CD of the Sharpe Series.

Originally from South Yorkshire, born into a family of musicians as is the case with most folk singers or musicians, Rusby is a very discrete artist, again not unlike a lot of artists from this genre. But as Helen Brown wrote in the Daily Telegraph about Awkward Annie (her last album of 2007): Listening to Kate Rusby’s lovely new album, it occurred to me that she’s England’s answer to Dolly Parton. Not in terms of the wigs and the sequins, but in her quaveringly sincere ability to tell a simple, downhome story in a song and make your heart ache for it. No scandals, but so much talent.

The only song to ever make it into the official Chartsin 2006 was ‘All Over Again’ which featured Rusby beside Ronan Keating. A song he redid and resang with other female singers such as Foortje. (Read her biography on her official site from the first link on how much she liked that cooperation.)

After six studio albums and countless folk festivals, Rusby has never lost that spherical shine in her voice which comes naturally and without any superficiality through the headphones. Her music is something to be put on in the early hours of a Sunday morning when the fog hasn’t lifted and exposed the land below. When the idea of a fairy dancing around your garden, gracing it to flower, is not yet burnt away by the midday sun.

Edit: Again it’s impossible to get my RSS to show all the Youtube videos I embedded. So please, head over to the post site to get all the goodness.