Ruth Moody

She was born in Australia and grew up in Manitoba, her early years spent on a goat farm, in a family where her mother was a musician and her father an English teacher, and she sang in harmony with her brother and sisters. She was classically trained from the age of four and from her mid-teens trained as a singer. In 1993 she began studying English and French literature at university, meaning to become a teacher, but in 1996 she turned to folk music instead.

From 1997 until it broke up in 2001 she was the lead singer of the Juno-nominated Winnipeg roots band Scruj MacDuhk, which made Live at the West End Cultural Centre (1997) and The Road to Canso (1999), and by the age of twenty she was crossing the continent with the band in an old van. After the split she concentrated on songwriting and took up the guitar, adding it to the piano, bodhrán, accordion and banjo. She released a solo EP, Blue Muse, in July 2002, and with two other former members of Scruj MacDuhk, Jeremy Penner and Oliver Swain, made the album South Bound (2003).

The Wailin’ Jennys began in January 2002 as a one-time performance at a small guitar shop in Winnipeg by three solo singer-songwriters, Moody, Nicky Mehta and Cara Luft. Their first full album, 40 Days (2004), produced by David Travers-Smith, included her “One Voice” and “Beautiful Dawn” and won the 2005 Juno for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Group. Annabelle Chvostek replaced Luft for Firecracker (2006), and Heather Masse joined in 2007; with Masse the trio made Live at the Mauch Chunk Opera House (2009), Bright Morning Stars (2011), which won the 2012 Juno in the same category, and Fifteen (2017), a set of other writers’ songs for the group’s fifteenth year.

Her first full-length solo album, The Garden, came out in April 2010, produced by Travers-Smith, and was nominated for the 2011 Juno for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Solo. In April 2012 her “Storm Comin’” won first prize in the gospel category of the International Songwriting Competition. That year she sang the title song as a guest on Waterbound, the first album by the Canadian string quartet the Fretless, and she sang on Mark Knopfler’s Privateering. Knopfler played guitar and sang on her second album, These Wilder Things (2013), again produced by Travers-Smith, and she sang a duet with him, “Wherever I Go,” on his Tracker (2015); that year she toured Europe and Britain both as his support act and as a guest in his band, playing venues such as the Royal Albert Hall. She took time off to start a family in 2016.

Wanderer (2024), her third solo album, is a set of ten of her own songs recorded at Sound Emporium in Nashville, co-produced by Moody and Dan Knobler and mixed by Tucker Martine, with a duet with Joey Landreth on “The Spell of the Lilac Bloom.” It won her English Songwriter of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards in April 2025. As of 2026 she remained a member of the Wailin’ Jennys and divided her time between Vancouver Island and Nashville.