Howay the Lasses

This striking 11-track collection from Howay the Lasses – a quartet featuring Annie Ball (vocals, accordion, piano), Bronwen Davies-Jones (vocals), Gareth Davies-Jones (vocals, guitar, mandolin, programming) plus Katie Tertell (cello, backing vocals) – presents a moving paean to the lives of women from the north-east of England, from the fêted to the altogether more obscure. Alongside a stripped back take on the candid 19th-century traditional song portraying mining life from a female perspective, ‘The Collier Lass’, the ten original songs penned by the quartet combine to form a rich tapestry of local stories.

Opening with beautifully interweaving cello and guitar lines, ‘Claudia Severa’ breathes new life into a fragment of Romano-British history dating from around 97-103 AD, an invitation (in Latin) to a birthday party inscribed in ink on a wooden writing tablet, unearthed at Vindolanda. The vivid ‘Janet Taylor’ extols the remarkable talents of this mathematician, astronomer, author, instrument maker and inventor, who was garlanded with medals from kings and popes and yet died in obscurity. The tribute to the award-winning South Shields artist and film animator, ‘Sheila Graber’, features some especially ear-catching three-part vocal harmonies, while the concluding song, ‘The Women's Engineering Society’, is an uplifting, foot-tapping delight.