BY MICHAEL CHOWNE

An entertaining and interesting gig on Sunday 12th July 2026 at The Courtyard Theatre in Hoxton, North London for ‘An Evening with Hillary Klug‘.

Hillary, from Fayetteville, Tennessee but now living in Nashville styles herself as the ‘Dancing Fiddler’ and put on a really good show here with Ed Hicks (from much closer to home in Turnpike Lane!), accompanying on banjo and acoustic guitar.

Some superb fiddle playing (almost all in complicated crossover tuning) from Hillary – mostly in traditional appalachian bluegrass country/Irish jig style, how she sings and dances at the same time is beyond me!

She spoke incredibly well too, giving us a lesson in different styles of dancing from clogging (usually team based and dancing to music rather than creating it) to buck dancing and Irish step dancing. It’s the buck dancing (referred to as flatfooting in Virginia) in which Hillary specialises – she’s been the USA national buck dancing champion twice! – and the pounding of her feet on a board is literally used to create music (she adds some clogging steps for a more attractive look).

So far, her recorded music has not included the buck dancing sounds that have since become synonymous with her shows but there’s a new album coming out in August that puts this right.

I’m not sure how much of the music she plays is original though I see that she did have some original music in one of my favourite films, ‘Wild Rose’, which was about a Glasgow country singer (highly recommended!).

There were a couple of songs from Hillary’s favourite film ‘O Brother, where art thou’ and some recognisable songs like ‘You Are My Sunshine’, ‘This Land Is Your Land’ and ‘Fire On The Mountain’.

Ed’s contribution was also superb and we even got a little dancing out of him!

Hillary has 5 more shows in England and Wales on this tour – get out to see her if you can!