“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.
Tuttle may know how to sing the high lonesome, but she performs her songs grinning ear to ear as if letting you in on a secret, often throwing in a wink for good measure. Her rendition of the sprightly sing-along Side Saddle, an anthem of spirited independence defying those who say “a girl can’t ride”, has the fun and intimacy of a campfire jam. Calling on bluegrass camaraderie, her audience, at first placid, were now all too willing to take up her invitation to whistle along.
She reinvents the Rolling Stones’ She’s A Rainbow, drawn from her 2020 covers album …but i’d rather be with you. Without compromising on the song’s joy, she transmutes its original psychedelia into earthy, Appalachian charm. Invited to join childhood hero Tommy Emmanuel at the end of his performance, together they played the title song from her Grammy-winning album Crooked Tree. Watching them play their guitars in lockstep, there is no distinction between student and master: with flair and flavour that is entirely her own, if you could bottle it, you’d buy two.
• At Palace theatre, Southend, with Tommy Emmanuel on 14 January, and touring
