Published: 26 January, 2012
by SEBASTIAN TAYLOR

The first performance of an Anglo/American country/folk duo involving Kathryn Roberts and Caroline Herring is taking place at Cecil Sharp House on Saturday evening.

It promises to be a great occasion.

Caroline Herring is one of the American South’s most unique and resonant voices.

She sang in church choirs as a child, starting her professional career as a host and house-band member of a live audience radio show in Oxford, Mississippi, in the late 1990s. Since then, she’s been based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Her music has been hailed for combining traditional sounds with striking, original observations into modern life and love, one critic saying she creates “musical tapestries fully of dark landscapes, bittersweet images and other-wordly moments”.

Barnsley-born Kathryn Roberts is one of our finest singers of traditional British song, well known through singing with partner Sean Lakeman.

Now, after a few years of motherhood, she’s returning to the place where she belongs, singing at the front of a stage.

She met up with Caroline Herring at an earlier Cecil Sharp House function and got on so well they decided to try out singing together.    

• The Dante Quartet is embarking on an exciting four-day exploration of all of Benjamin Britten’s string quartets at Kings Place next week, starting on Wednesday, twinning the pieces with works by his teacher, Frank Bridge, and by Purcell, his greatest influence. In addition, Robin Michael is playing Britten’s spectacular cello suites and Nicholas Daniel the colourful Metamorphoses.