Ruth Lindsay

What to expect

Birmingham's own Ruth Lindsay and friends will put on a special show celebrating traditional Irish music for St Patrick's Day.

Ruth is a fiddle player who specializes in traditional Irish and Scottish music and has a Classical music degree from Birmingham Conservatoire.

She performs extensively as a folk fiddler and theatre musician, is in demand as a session player and writer/arranger, and has featured on many folk recordings and albums.

She first picked up a violin at age 6 in Scotland, was introduced to traditional music through her father’s Scottish Dance band, began playing for dancing at 14, appeared on BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Take The Floor’, featured on her father’s albums, and performed for RSCDS events.

She completed a degree at Birmingham Conservatoire with violin tutors Alexandra Wood and Simon Smith, gained classical solo, orchestral and chamber experience, continued to explore traditional folk music, and learned from local musicians in the Irish Session Scene.

She was a founding member of Bonfire Radicals until 2016; the band toured the UK, recorded an EP and the album ‘The Albino Peacock’ (Burning Bones Records, 2016), played major UK folk festivals, and were featured on BBC Radio 3’s Music Planet with Kathryn Tickell.

In 2018 she began performing with folk singer Katy Rose Bennett, helped arrange and write Katy’s music, and in 2020 appeared on Katy’s single ‘Where Does it Hurt’, which later featured on an album of the same name.

Folk Radio described the single as ‘A sublimely powerful song of great depth’ and ‘a superlative string quartet arrangement by Ruth Lindsay’.

She continued to perform on the folk scene as a fiddle player and in 2025 became the fiddle player in Birmingham’s famous Klezmer, Balkan and British Folk super group The Destroyers.

She has travelled extensively as a musician and has a keen interest in learning and sharing traditional music while visiting other countries, particularly music from Ireland, Scotland, Southern and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.