Taking place at the Ivy Leaf Club from 8:00 to 11:00, this year the event features Mary Humphreys and Anahata followed by Eddie Walker.

Tickets with be available from 1st October 2009 and are £8.50. The box office number is 01733 204055, if you would rather write the address is Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival Tickets, 4 Delph Street, Whittlesey, Peterborough, PE7 1QQ. Cheques to be made payable to Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival and please include a stamped addressed envelope.

Mary Humphreys and Anahata are established on the British folk scene as enthusiastic and entertaining performers of traditional material. With extensive research, skilled musicianship and a huge variety of instruments they have unearthed and brought back to vivid life some rare gems of English song and music.

Mary sings traditional songs, mostly in English and a few in her native Welsh, and plays banjo and concertina. Anahata accompanies with melodeons, concertina and cello, and they play instrumental arrangements, mostly of English traditional music.

Brought up in Wrexham, N Wales. Started singing in Folk Clubs in Manchester and ran the University Folk Club while there as a student. Was a resident for many years at Harry Boardman's Folk Club in Manchester. Has a long history of gigs in the Manchester area, and has performed on BBC local radio. Was later a resident at the Ryburn Three Step Club in West Yorkshire.

Anahata was introduced to folk music when a student at Cambridge. Started with a morris team in Chelmsford, learnt to play piano accordion, then concertina, button accordion and melodeon. Played in various dance and song bands. In more recent years associated with Angel Morris and (briefly) Hammersmith Morris in London.

For more details you can visit their websites www.treewind.co.uk and www.maryhumphreys.co.uk

 ...Singer, Guitarist and Songwriter...Contemporary and Traditional Folk....Original Songs and Guitar Instrumentals....Old Blues, Rags and Hillbilly.

North East of England, born bred and still resident to date, Eddie Walker was drawn to anything musical in his early years that might have been described as folk or country, be it in school music lessons, on the BBC Light Programme or late-night-listening to Radio Luxembourg! He got the inevitable second-hand acoustic guitar by which time TV was emerging as a strong source of musical inspiration. Folk singers appeared on news interest and even religious programmes as well as shows devoted entirely to this new genre. It was frequently to be found in the popular charts as well, he was hooked and the hunt was on. Word of mouth made tell of clubs in backrooms of pubs where all manner of folk musics were sung by Bob Dylan impersonators and Clancy Brother lookalikes in white Arran sweaters. He discovered the great new songs of Ewan McColl that sounded much older and ‘British’ in style than the those by Americans Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs, whose music then inevitably led him back to find Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and he understood where Dylan had found his early inspiration. But he found it all captivating music. And his source became the then limited supply of material in his local record shop and he bought albums of Irish rebel songs and old Scottish ballads and those songs he sang at folk clubs throughout the Teesside area, learned from Nigel Denver, Carolyn Hester and Joan Baez. He was 17 and left school, met others in the workplace with similar interest and went off to festivals to see his heroes first hand. Paxton, Tom Rush, Alex Campbell, Trevor Lucas, Martin Carthy, and through his annual visits to the Cambridge Folk Festival heard the legendary ragtime-blues guitarist Rev. Gary Davis, brought over from the USA by Stefan Grossman. And Grossman talked of other guitar legends, Mississippi John Hurt, Big Bill Broonzy and Blind Willie McTell, whose material would become so important to Eddie’s developing performing career, and he loved all the Bluegrass, Old Timey and Hillbilly music he heard there at Cambridge, and he played it all.                                                     

After many years of touring, re-establishing his solo career especially in his native North East England became a priority. He made contact with clubs that he hadn’t played for many years especially throughout Durham, Tyneside and North Yorkshire’ and the warmest of welcomes was afforded him. The repertoire and guitar skills had developed and the latest recorded offering, ‘Mind To Ramble’, was now showing a vocalist of some quality and maturity.