If pressed for a description of Kate Rusby’s latest album, Underneath the Stars, I’d have to go with: “garden songs”. As in, songs you (or perhaps your mother) would sing out in the yard while planting the beans or daffodils or barley. In case you missed her at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Rusby is a ballad singer from Yorkshire, England, where people still use words like “thou” and “nought”, and her light, rustic voice has produced some of the best music to come over from Britain since the Stone Roses. As with her earlier albums, Underneath the Stars offers a mix of traditional songs—some dating from the 16th century or earlier—and contemporary tunes, most written by Kate herself. The lyrics are peopled with sailors, soldiers, lovers and ghosts, in circumstances humorous or lamentable. Rusby’s last album, Little Lights, was decidedly melancholy, but Underneath the Stars is dominated by merry little airs like “King Henry and the Blind Harper”, “The Goodman”, and “Let Me Be”, where a young girl mocks at the men who are courting her:

They say a girl like me should wed,
And take a man to lay in my bed,
But I would like to stay young and free,
O I wish they would let me be.

In the lamentable column we have “The White Cockade”, one of the numerous 18th century tunes where the lover gets boondoggled into enlisting, and “Sweet William’s Ghost”, a variant of the old ballad “Clerk Sanders”. The latter has been put to a rather plodding tune; nonetheless the lyrics make it exceptional:

Is there room at your head Willie,
Or room here at your feet,
Or room here at your side Willie,
Where-in that I may sleep?

There’s no room at my head Margaret,
And no room at my feet,
There’s no room at my side Margaret,
My coffin is so neat.

Rusby’s original numbers include “Polly”—a retelling of the ballad “John Riley”—and the title song. “Underneath the Stars” is contemporary folk at its warmest, a knock-me-over-dead beautiful tune with transcendent lyrics. “Underneath the stars you left me, / I wonder if the stars regret me”. If I were the stars, I certainly wouldn’t. Starlight is, after all, the best setting for Kate’s music—candlelight is acceptable too, but no neon, strobes or spotlights. This is garden music, remember, not nightclub fare. Those who are growing impatient with that, who think that Rusby, after ten years in folk, should shake it up a little, forget that she’s not a pop star but a folk balladeer, and one of the finest living.

- Joel Van Valin