Lady Maisery
English folk vocal harmony trio
Lady Maisery are an English folk vocal harmony trio composed of Hannah James (vocals, piano accordion, clogs, percussion), Hazel Askew (vocals, melodeon, harp, harmonium concertina, bells) and Rowan Rheingans (vocals, fiddle, banjo).
Lady Maisery sing traditional and contemporary folk songs. They released their first album, Weave & Spin in 2011, their second, Mayday, in 2013, their third, Cycle, in 2016, and most recently Tender in 2022.
Name
Lady Maisery's name is based on one that appears in a number of traditional folk songs, most notably the Child ballad "Lady Maisry", but also "The Laily Worm & The Machrel of The Sea" (the former of these appears on their second album, Mayday).
History
In 2011, Lady Maisery released Weave & Spin and were subsequently nominated for the Horizon Award in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, and for Best Debut in the Spiral Awards. The album was also made 'Album of the Week' in The Independent. In 2012 they were featured on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and in 2013 they have twice appeared on BBC Radio 3's classical music programme 'In Tune'.
In 2013, they released a charity download single to mark International Women's Day on 8 March—a version of Kate Bush’s song "This Woman’s Work"--with proceeds donated to the charity coalition "End Violence Against Women". This preceded the release of their second album, Mayday, which was launched in both London and Sheffield.
During 2013, Lady Maisery also gave a number of performances of "Rest", a secular requiem, composed for them by Emily Hall and Toby Litt as the third in the pair's trilogy of song cycles.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lady Maisery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.