Bella Hardy

Bella Hardy, a British folk singer, songwriter, and fiddler, first surfaced in the mid-2000s with an intense, emotionally charged vocal style that prompted early comparisons to June Tabor. Raised in Edale, Derbyshire, amid the Peak District’s striking landscape, she spent her early years in a small, isolated, tightly connected community whose character echoed the rural settings where traditional song once thrived. At thirteen, after being inspired by little-known club singer Theresa Tooley at the nearby Stainsby Folk Festival, she joined a Folkworks summer school in Durham. Fiddle lessons with Peter Cooper followed, and she soon sang and played in the teenage band the Brat Pack, which grew out of the summer school and performed at festivals as a twelve-piece before shortening its name to the Pack. In 2003 she left Derbyshire to read English at university in York and became a member of the folk trio Ola alongside Michael Jary and Helen Bell; the group later recorded the album The Animals Are in the West.

After settling in London she worked as a singing tutor and began performing solo as a fiddler and vocalist, thereby starting her independent career. In April 2007, aged twenty-three, she secured funding from the Prince’s Trust to record an album and enlisted Corrina Hewatt, Emily and Hazel Askew, Chris Sherburn, Joe Oliver, and Hannah James. Released on Noe Records, Night Visiting earned critical praise and brought two BBC Radio 2 Folk Award nominations. Its 2009 successor, In the Shadow of the Mountains, met with equal approval and placed her firmly among the foremost figures in the U.K. folk scene. From 2011 onward a burst of activity produced four solo albums in three years: Songs Lost & Stolen (2011), a contemporary reworking of material from The Ballads and Songs of Derbyshire; the traditional set The Dark Peak and the White (2012); the holiday recording Bright Morning Star (2012); and Battleplan (2013), another traditional collection. She also formed a collaborative quartet with Eliza Carthy, Lucy Farrell, and Kate Young. Billed as Carthy Hardy Farrell Young, the group debuted in 2012 with Laylam.

After winning Folk Singer of the Year at the 2014 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, Hardy released her seventh album, With the Dawn, in 2015. In 2017 she issued the distinctive original composition Eternal Spring, conceived and recorded in Yunnan Province, China. That same year saw her eighth and most stylistically varied release, the Paul Savage-produced Hey Sammy, which leaned toward a pop-inspired sound.