Anna Massie - Glad Company

Scottish Folk Band Of The Year 2006 (Anna Massie Band) - Scots Trad Music Awards

(November 2003) 12 tracks: Trip To Windsor * Dad's Landrover * Westcoaster * The Pippin * The Mission Hall * 7/8s * An Cluinne Mi Mo Nighean Donn * Bogle's Majority * Spoon River * The Slip Reel * 100 Years Since * Glad Company.

Anna Massie (fiddle, guitar, mandoline, banjo) with Jean Butterworth (guitar, vocals) and Mairearad Green (accordion, bagpipes).

Anna Massie was, at thirteen, a multi-instrumentalist and already showing the flair and feeling for the tradition that would take her to the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of Year 2003 title, in a thrilling and entertaining final.

Brought up in a household where music was a constant soundtrack - her father plays guitar, banjo and mandolin - Anna started playing guitar at the age of seven when her father returned from Edinburgh Festival with a guitar bought from a car boot sale.

Throughout her teens Anna continued to play guitar, violin and mandolin. She joined her father's band, the Kerry Blues Ceilidh Band, in 1996, and spent almost every weekend playing at dances around the Highlands, gaining experience and developing her stagecraft and comfortable way with an audience.

At the same time she became joint leader of the Highland Region Youth Orchestra, touring Ireland and Poland, and was a regular with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland for four years. She subsequently became leader of her school orchestra and worked for both Balnain House and the Highland Council as a fiddle instructor.

Between leaving school and beginning her studies on the BA(Hons) Applied Music course at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow in October 2002, Anna spent a year in Canada, living just outside Toronto, where she played and absorbed Cape Breton and Irish fiddling styles. She also worked in New York at French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts, the largest private summer camp in the United States.

Many more accolades and achievements are sure to follow for this talented and natural musician.