On one of the occasions, when I was on my own, I wandered into the second half of Katie’s performance at the Troubadour. This performance was my first pleasant surprise of the National Folk Festival and luckily I arrived just as Katie was about to sing Fred the Dog. Katie Rowe is an excellent song writer singer, with simple, quite and honest folk songs up there with the best that the tradition has to offer. As before, here are my three favourite songs.
- Butterfly is a beautiful, heart tugging love song of an offer that is in the end refused.
- The next song is a very bitter sweet personal tale of the day Katie’s and her brothers went to a river near Jindabyne to say goodbye.
- In the modern era, you can get translations of dog speech; so what happens? A riot of fun in Fred the Dog.
