Sam Lee

How many traditional English folk singers do you know who come from North London, studied at Chelsea School of Art, worked as a forager and wilderness expert while moonlighting as a burlesque dancer – until a chance encounter led to the door of the great Scottish Traveller singer Stanley Robertson, and an extraordinary four-year apprenticeship into the arcane, living world of traditional song that few outside the Traveller and Gypsy communities have ever experienced?

Since bursting on to the folk scene at the end of the Noughties, Sam Lee has blazed a trail as an outstanding singer and song collector, the driving force behind the eclectic, award-winning folk club The Nest Collective, which has brought traditional music to all kinds of new stages and venues, and founder of a burgeoning song collectors’ movement that inspires a new generation of performers to draw on living source singers rather than books and records.