Salut! Live

My album of the 1990s was the eponymous offering from Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts, two of Barnsley's finest products, which included this Suzanne Vega song.

If I had been choosing my Song of the Day from that album, I might have gone for KRx2's breathtaking version of Ned of the Hill.

But The Queen and the Soldier was a great track, too, and has continued to form part of Kathryn's repertoire with her partner Sean Lakeman, one of the three generously talented Devon brothers whose work so enriches folk and folk-rock (Seth is the best known but Sean and Sam have each made a notable impact, too).

One of the aspects of this series I have particularly enjoyed has been finding clips on YouTube that have been viewed relatively little. At the time of writing, this one has been seen 867 times, a little way short of Lady Gaga's 400 million hits for Bad Romance, a figure that leaves me feeling a little left out but with no pressing desire to do anything about it (time of writing was summer 2011; it's gone up quite a bit since).

Kate Rusby once told me she quite liked folk music's minority appeal.

When the AskMen website filched one of her comments to me (without attribution) - "it's like a rare diamond... I like it that people have to look that bit harder for it" - it instantly conformed to media stereotype with the idiotic observation" "Kate Rusby's music exists in the shadows of the folk genre, but that doesn't make her accomplishments any less respectable."

Kathryn Roberts's voice is quite different from Kate's, but belongs in the same shadows. This is a beautiful interpretation of a fine song.

* Buy Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman's albums at this Salut! Live Amazon link, where you will also find the Roberts/Rusby album mentioned above and almost everything else covered in the Song of the Day series.