An exceptional night of folk music at Oxford’s favourite new intimate performing space, the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, hosted by the city’s own literary troubadour, Huck.

Daughter of Mennonite missionaries, Rachel Ries hails from the inspiring, vast expanses of South Dakota, by way of Zaire. Her formative years were filled with Congolese spirituals, Mennonite hymns and her mom singing her to sleep with The Carpenters. In her life these days, the choirs have turned into bands, the churches into clubs but her mom can still sing like Karen Carpenter. Classically trained in voice, piano, violin and viola, Rachel marries sophisticated, at times vintage, musicality to smart lyrics. With a self-taught guitar style reminiscent of Mississippi John Hurt and vocals that at times recall Billie Holiday and early Maria Muldaur, her songs range from the romantic simplicity of jazz standards to the distilled intensity of poet Anne Sexton. Ms. Ries has an adventurous ear for melody and a voice flexible enough to accomplish it.

The literate, compassionate songs of Jack Harris have won him much acclaim in songwriting circles. A South By Southwest showcasing artist at seventeen, Jack was also the first international act to win the New Folk songwriting competition at The Kerrville Folk Festival, Texas. Previous winners include Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Gillian Welch and Devon Sproule. Jack’s live show is a riveting mix of song-craft and story-telling, adorned by intricate fingerstyle guitar and smoky, soulful vocals. Drawing from the narrative traditions of folk and blues music, Jack brings both into the here and now; a “born poet”, whose songs are steeped in myth and mystery.

Humphrey ‘Huck’ Astley was born in 1982 in Oxford, England, where he studied at Ruskin College. In the early 2000s he founded the webzine Rain Over Bouville and published collections by poets in Canada, Sweden and the UK, and in 2008 wrote the short film Looking for My Brother. As a musician, Astley cut his teeth with notorious noise‐rock quintet Sextodecimo before fronting the short-lived but much-loved Huck and the Handsome Fee, whose ramshackle six-week tour of the US would inspire the creation of his three-part album and stage show Alexander The Great: A Folk Operetta. Not so much a historical work as a ‘queer runaway myth’ of two young friends in modern-day Dixie, the operetta brings his skills as a poet and storyteller right to the fore.

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