Catherine Britt

Performing: MAIN STAGE  Saturday, 7 Nov, 8.00pm

Catherine Britt has come a long way.  No longer the innocent teenage girl who won the praise of Elton John after discovering her during a tour of Australia in 2002, she’s now an accomplished and mature singer-songwriter with three albums to her credit and a fourth due to be released this year.

Catherine has toured, performed and recorded with some country music’s biggest names such as Keith Urban, Tommy Emmanuel and Buddy Miller who all contributed to her superb second album, “Little Wildflower.”

Catherine’s musical talents stem from an upbringing constantly filled with music.  She was exposed to everything from African beats to The Beatles but her Dad’s favourite style of music was country.
 

A meeting with Bill Chambers was a sign of big things to come. “I was scared to death, because I was such a huge fan, but I went up and asked him if I could make a request and he said, ‘of course.’ So I asked him to sing ‘T.B. Blues,’ which was one of Jimmie Rodgers. He looked at me in a really funny way and asked me how old I was.  I told him I was eleven and he said, ‘How the hell do you know about Jimmie Rodgers?!”

 

Chambers brought her on stage to sing “T.B. Blues” with him; invited her to sing at a Merle Haggard tribute he was hosting in Sydney the following week and proceeded to take the youngster under his wing.  By the time she was 14, Catherine had made her first recording, a Chambers-produced EP called, ‘In The Pines’. When ‘That Don’t Bother Me’, a song she’d co-written with Kasey Chambers, was released to radio, it soared to the Top 10 on the local country radio charts and record labels took notice. Thanks to her age however, nothing came of it – at least, not at the time.