Christmas isn’t in full flight until Barnsley’s nightingale, Kate Rusby, starts her annual festive tour.

Forget the defrosting diva, Miss Carey. With seven Christmas albums and an almost twenty-year tradition of a festive tour, it’s self-confessed holly head Kate who’s the unofficial queen of Christmas.

Folk royalty since the early ‘90s, with 23 albums, a Mercury Prize, and a catalogue of celebrity fans to her name, Kate is one of the brightest stars to come out of South Yorkshire.

Her youthful and angelic voice, with its unique Yorkshire twang, could melt even the frostiest of bleak midwinter hearts.  

From early December, theatres up and down the country will be beginning to sound a lot like Christmas as Kate and her boys play to packed-out audiences looking to get the Christmas season underway.

Kate’s Christmas gigs are a cornucopia of spellbinding self-penned stories and traditional folk-filled carols – but not as you know it.

Her Yuletide hits are steeped in South Yorkshire’s stout pub sings of generations gone by, when villagers would meet for a cider-fuelled carolling singsong every weekend between Armistice and New Year.

The centuries-old tradition stemmed from the Victorian era when raucous carols were banned in churches and replaced by mundane, calmer ones. So the congregation swapped the pews for the pubs.

Kate’s fondest childhood Christmas memories are of evenings spent at these Christmas sings with a bottle of pop and a colouring book while the grown-ups belted out the merry tunes.

“Mum and Dad always made it a magical Christmas even though we never had much money. One tradition was they’d take us to the likes of the Royal Hotel at Dungworth for these Christmas sings. It’s a tradition that passed through the generations; my dad was taken there by his uncle, and we now take our kids each year,” Kate says.

The revellers are joined by an organist or brass quartet, and the lyrics and tunes to some of our most well-known carols differ from pub to pub.

Kate’s Christmas tour, which she’s done annually since 2005, and her seven Christmas albums have eternalised this forgotten part of South Yorkshire’s history.

“There are 30 different versions of ‘While Shepherds Watch’ that you’ve probably never heard of. Ours is called Sweet Bells and it’s my favourite Christmas song. It was my dad’s mistake. When he was younger, he took the tune of one song and the lyrics of another and thought that was the proper version. It’s a great sing-along version so we can’t not do it every year.”

Each year she’s joined on stage by ten other musicians: her regular five-piece band, which includes husband Damien O’Kane on guitar and banjo, and a brass quintet paying homage to her Yorkshire roots.

“There’s a family history of mining but my dad used to fix brass instruments, too. On a Sunday morning there’d be a knock at the door and a man from a band such as Grimethorpe would say ‘Ey, lass give this to your dad.’ Dad would go to rehearsals to return their instruments and I always begged him to take me with him. Even as a child I found brass music so moving. It stirs something deep within.”

It’s perhaps cliché to say that music is in your blood. But for Kate, it really is.

Her parents, Steve and Ann, met on the Barnsley folk scene many moons ago. They performed in a Ceilidh band together at the local folk clubs and Barnsley’s former folk festival.

“Mum was a singer and Dad had a banjo and a van, so it was a match made in heaven. Our parents were always singing and there were aways instruments around the house, but music was never forced on us.

“Some kids would rebel against their parents’ choice of music, but it was never boring to us. We grew up listening to the likes of Dave Burland, a fellow Barnsley folk singer who moonlighted as a police officer. The old folk ballads were our bedtime stories. They were like mini films; I loved the characters and the stories that would unfold,” Kate says.

When she was a child, Kate’s dad worked as a sound engineer, so summer weekends were often spent tripping about the country in the car to various folk festivals taking place. This was in the 1970s and ‘80s, in a time before screens, so Kate and her siblings, older sister Emma and younger brother Joe, would all sing together to pass the time.

“We were doing harmonies before we knew what they were.”

The Rusby kids all learned to play the fiddle at a young age. But Kate was always keen to learn more. She taught herself to play guitar using Willy Russell’s acoustic guitar that was permanently on loan in their house.

“My dad taught me about three chords and I would sit for hours practicing with this massive guitar, or making up my own chords. One year I begged my parents for a piano and Dad brought one home from a pub. It was covered in beer and stunk that much that Mum banished it to the garage, but I loved it.”

It was that wretched old piano that was the key to Kate landing what has become an enduring career in music.

While Kate was tinkering away one day, a family friend, who happened to organise Holmfirth Folk Festival, popped her head around the garage door.

“She said ‘You’re getting a bit good at that. Do you fancy a slot at the festival?’ I regretted saying yes as I was so nervous. I was only about 16 or 17 and I vowed never to do it again. But as soon as I came off stage someone else asked me to perform at their event and I said yes. All I could think was ‘why did I do that?’”

As more and more bookings came in, Kate decided to take a gap year from her studies to focus on music. She’d been at Barnsley College doing a BTEC in performing arts.

“We were at the old Electric Theatre then. I loved my time there and made lifelong friends like Shaun Dooley – he aways comes to my London gigs with his wife and kids.

“I picked the drama pathway and I wasn’t super at it but I was asked to audition for a role in Emmerdale where I got down to the last two. But music wouldn’t have happened had I got the part.”

Instead, Kate emersed herself into the folk music scene. She became part of two bands in the 1990s: as lead vocalist of The Poozies, and with fellow Barnsley singer Kathryn Roberts in Equation.

A solo career followed, bringing with it a Mercury Prize in 1999 for her second solo album Speechless, followed by various BBC Radio 2 folk awards in the early 2000s.

With a career now spanning three decades, she’s gone from playing to small crowds at folk clubs and getting snubbed by theatres at the mention of folk music, to regularly selling out 3,000-seater venues and collaborating with the likes of Richard Hawley, KT Tunstall, and Ronan Keating.

Kate’s music has been used on TV shows such as Ruth Jones’ Stella, Ricky Gervais’ Afterlife and Jennifer Saunders’ Jam and Jerusalem, having picked up many celebrity fans over the years.

“I’ve been touring for that long that I’ve made so many connections and unexpected links. I remember we once did a gig in a folk club and someone came in to tell me Paul Weller was there. I told them ‘Don’t be daft, Paul Weller won’t be at my gig’. But he was. And he said it was the only gig he’d ever been to where they had a meat raffle.

“Another time we did a gig in the little hall at Sheffield City Hall, and the main hall act was Ade Edmonson and Rik Mayal. I shoved this door open and sent Ade flying. He asked me what music we were playing, and we’ve been friends ever since.”

Kate’s music became such a part of the playlist in the Edmonson/Saunders household that when Jennifer was writing her BBC series, Jam and Jerusalem, she asked Kate to record a cover of The Kinks’ The Village Green Preservation Society for the show’s theme tune.

“She also got us appearing as the wedding band in one episode. We filmed it at this pub with all these amazing actors like Joanna Lumley, Sue Johnston, Sally Phillips and Dawn French.”

There’s a notion that musicians give up their right to a normal life for one spent in the spotlight. But Kate is one of the exceptions; despite her transcending success across the globe, she’s remained true to her South Yorkshire roots.

She still lives in Cawthorne, near to where she grew up, with husband Damien and their two teenage daughters, Daisy and Phoebe.  

“My dad says I’m the least ambitious person he’s ever met. I don’t want to sell millions of albums around the world as I would miss home too much. We used to do four weeks touring America and now a week down south is too long for me,” Kate says

But she is ambitious in a nonconformist way.

Throughout her 32-year career, Kate has made 23 albums and, in a huge power pay, she owns the rights to every single one, thanks to a smart decision to set up her own record company in the 1990s.

“When I started working on my solo material, Dad was asking people he knew about getting a record deal. Everyone told us to be wary of signing this deal or that one as they’ll try and rob you blind. At that time, Dad was a lecturer at Leeds College of Music but was looking for something else to do. So we set up Pure Records, named after the Greek meaning of Kate.”

Under Pure Records, Kate released her first solo album, Hourglass, in 1997. And, as enquiries kept coming in, it soon became a family affair. Steve handled all the bookings, Ann did the accounts, older sister Kate was in charge of marketing and PR, and younger brother Joe became Kate’s sound engineer, having followed in their dad’s footsteps.

“We’ve all made a living off music that was in the house as kids. Which is funny because in the early days I was that happy to get any gig that I often forgot to get paid. I was always shy talking about money but Dad would say ‘You’ve got to put diesel in the car, you can’t do it for nothing!’”

It’s grown organically over the last three decades to encompass other folk artists. For the last ten years, Pure Records has also organised the popular Underneath the Stars Festival, named after Kate’s fifth album.

Steve retired a few years ago and Damien now looks after the day-to-day running of it. But Kate and her siblings are still all involved.

“We do our own thing in Barnsley, make our own decisions and do it our way. I love the flexibility of being my own boss. I decide how many hours I spend in the studio, what my next album will be called, even down to the artwork.

“I still love getting in the studio. You start with nothing then you get to share it with the world, a bit like sending your child off to school.”

In recent years, Kate has made an album each year and, after the release of her seventh Christmas album Light Years, she’s currently working on her upcoming album When They All Looked Up.

Damien has been in the producer’s seat since 2011, bringing a new dimension and a new audience to Kate’s music. Together they’ve experimented with the soundscape, adding electronic elements inspired by Damien’s teenage love of house music back in Ireland.  

“It really works as a partnership. I can leave him in the studio while I pick the girls up from school. We’re best friends and it’s not often we don’t see eye to eye. He’s also my favourite banjo and guitar player, so how cool is it to have that in your house. It’s also good to have his support when we’re away from home on tour.”

With such a vast back catalogue, it’s any wonder she doesn’t get writer’s block from time to time. But her songwriting continues to pull on the heartstrings, bewitching us all with the pure intentions of her melodies.

“Things come to me in the middle of the night or in the most mundane parts of the day. I wrote Life in a Paper Boat (the titular track on her fourteenth album) after watching the news while stood ironing. There was a segment about people going over to Italy by dinghy and there was a woman carrying a bundle of her belongings. It was actually a baby. As a mother, I just had a moment. It’s the happiest songs that are hardest to write,” she says.

“I’ve also got a cupboard full of old ballad books that I’ve picked up over the years when visiting a town or city on a Sunday and the only place open is the second-hand bookshop. Some of these books are over 200 years old, and there are songs in there that have lain dormant for years. I’ll rewrite them or finish them off, and it’s like releasing a bird and giving it freedom.”

The Rusby music gene has been passed down to the next generation in daughters Daisy and Phoebe. They both appeared on Hand Me Down, Kate’s 2020 album made entirely of covers, and have even performed on stage at Glastonbury in the slot before McFly.

“Both are wonderful singers but it’s sometimes difficult to get them to stick at an instrument now they’re teenagers as they’ve got other interests, too. Phoebe, our youngest, is currently learning to play the drums and it’s been the making of her. She’s got amazing rhythm and has had since she started walking.

“The kids have had a great childhood and they’ve travelled with us when we’ve been touring. We’re lucky that we’ve got such a great support network with our family.”

After her 12-date Winter Lights tour, it will be back to Barnsley for Christmas Day as Kate and her family gear up for a proper a Rusby celebration.

“We all still live within ten minutes’ walk of each other, so we have starters at one house, mains at another and pudding at the other, with a pint in the pub between all three.”

And no doubt a few merry renditions of Sweet Bells!

You can join the fun of Kate’s Christmas tour here in South Yorkshire this year. She’ll be performing at Sheffield City Hall on Sunday 15^th December. She’s also headlining the Folk Cancer gig at Penistone Paramount at the end of November. Tickets are available at katerusby.com