Rosie Hood at Cecil Sharp House

June 2017 will see Rosie Hood release her first full-length solo album The Beautiful & The Actual, a collection of old and new folk songs.

Rosie Hood is a young folk singer from Wiltshire, known for her strong, pure voice and engaging solo performance. A BBC Performing Arts Fellow in 2015 and a 2016 Horizon Award nominee at the Radio 2 Folk Awards, Rosie has become more than purely a traditional singer. Having started learning folk songs at an early age from her family, Rosie has a keen interest in the history of traditional songs, particularly those of her native Wiltshire, where she has spent time researching in the local archives and developing a broad repertoire of local songs. Rosie’s Fellowship year with the English Folk Dance & Song Society proved a pivotal point in her career giving her time and space to develop as an artist.

Inspiration for the new album comes from Wiltshire Poet Alfred Williams; “I have tried to depict the beautiful and the actual”, wrote Alfred Williams in 1923 in the introduction to his book Folk Songs of the Upper Thames. A hammerman, poet, linguist and historian, Alfred Williams was also a prolific folk song collector. In the years prior to World War I he visited the towns and villages close to his home of South Marston, Wiltshire, just 10 miles from Rosie’s home village of Minety, and collected hundreds of songs, eight of which Rosie has arranged and recorded here. “I hope that my interpretations of these songs do the same”, Rosie says of Williams’ words that inspired the title of her debut album. “I feel that Alfred Williams was talking about the duality that exists within his collection of songs, but to me the title reflects the duality within the songs themselves. There’s life and death, love and betrayal, beautiful melodies and hauntingly sad lyrics,” Rosie explains.
photo credit Louise Bichon