“Are there any London cowgirls out there tonight?” ventures Molly Tuttle, the Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter who is reinvigorating the bluegrass tradition with a future-facing style of storytelling. Warming up a largely sedate audience in Cadogan Hall for Australian guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel, by the time she’d finished with them, they were awakened rangers ready to grab the bull by the horns.
Renowned for her acrobatic skill with the guitar, effortlessly moving from crosspicking to flatpicking and clawhammer strums (“I know we’re all guitar nerds here”), she plays it with the ease of meeting an old friend. Though her fables of life on the open road, matters of the heart and cannabis farmers in the Blue Ridge Mountains are usually embroidered by her band Golden Highway, tonight, she plays solo – but this is far from a stripped-back performance. She mines the instrument for the bass and rhythm in remarkable self-sufficiency, galloping through the valleys of El Dorado and San Joaquin drawn from her latest album City of Gold.
