She lent her voice to some of the sweetest folk and bluegrass harmonies in her group The Wailin’ Jennys.
This month, Ruth Moody brings her solo tour to the Rams Head in Annapolis, Maryland, on Tuesday, May 21, followed by a show at The Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, on May 23.
“I release my record ‘Wanderer’ on May 17, so the show at Rams Head will be my first show of the tour,” Moody told WTOP. “I’ll be playing music from the new record, probably some old stuff too, but I’ll be focusing on the new songs. The Birchmere is a couple of nights later. It’ll be my first time [solo] at both venues. The Jennys have played The Birchmere many times, it’s one of our favorite venues, so I’m very excited to be there with my own band.”
Born in Australia, Moody mostly grew up in Manitoba, Canada where her first band was hilariously called “Scruj MacDuhk” after the animated Disney character.
“I discovered folk music largely through the Winnipeg Folk Festival, a really great music festival that happens every summer in Winnipeg, and also through Celtic music,” Moody said. “My voice teacher agreed that I didn’t have an operatic voice and started exposing me to traditional Irish and Scottish songs. I really took to them and discovered that I had a real affinity for that kind of music, so I started building up a repertoire of traditional songs.”
In 2002, she joined Nicky Mehta and Cara Luft to form The Wailin’ Jennys for the self-titled debut album “The Wailin’ Jennys” — a nod to country music legend Waylon Jennings, who coincidentally had just died.
“It was a bittersweet accident,” Moody said. “We became a band three weeks before he died, so we actually had people thinking that we were a tribute band and wanting us to do his music. We actually had people coming to shows thinking they were coming to see Waylon Jennings. It was an interesting first couple of years. … We’ve actually talked about covering a Waylon Jennings song, we’ve just never done it, but you’ve re-instilled that in my mind.”
Luft left the group after their next album “40 Days” (2004), allowing Annabelle Chvostek to join for “Firecracker” (2006), featuring an awesome rendition of the timeless traditional folk song “Long Time Traveler.”
“That’s a special song,” Moody said. “I actually used to sing that song with Scruj MacDuhk and it just always stayed with me. Then when The Jennys formed, I brought it to the band and we rearranged it. That was in the second incarnation of The Jennys, we recorded that on ‘Firecracker,’ it’s just a very beautiful, simple, hymn-like song. It was actually in the TV show ‘The English’ recently, so a lot of people have discovered it, it’s had a resurgence.”
In 2007, Heather Masse joined the group for the albums “Live at the Mauch Chunk Opera House” (2009), “Bright Morning Stars” (2011) and “Fifteen” (2017), featuring a transcendent cover of Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers.”
“We have always loved that song and we arranged it in 2014,” Moody said. “Actually, I remember very vividly the first time we ever played it was at The Birchmere and it got a great response and we just kept it as part of our live shows. We went on hiatus for me to have my son, but we really wanted to put a new record out and fans had been asking for that song, so that’s what inspired us to make an album of covers.”
Along the way, Moody has released a string of solo albums, including “Blue Muse” (2002), “The Garden” (2010), “These Wilder Things” (2013) and most recently “Wanderer,” including the nostalgic heartbreak song “Seventeen.”
“I was living on Mayne Island in the Gulf Islands of Canada during the pandemic, just sort of thinking about the past,” Moody said. “It just came from thinking a lot about life and thinking about the past, and trying to figure out why certain things happened and what gets us on the path that we’re on. That song sort of came out of those musings and also I was in a very beautiful place in the world and just so inspired to write there.”
Listen to our full conversation on the podcast below:
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