Rheingans grew up in the village of
Grindleford, in
Derbyshire's
Peak District. Her father worked as a
violin-maker and invented the
bansitar instrument, while her mother ran a Saturday morning
clogging club for children and organised the
Eyam Folk Festival in the Derbyshire Dales. With Songs of Separation, Rheingans won Best Album at the 2017
BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. With Lady Maisery, Rheingans joined with English musicians
O’Hooley & Tidow to perform in the folk supergroup Coven. performing in
Towersey,
Oxfordshire, in 2018 Rheingans and her sister Anna perform as the duo The Rheingans Sisters. The Rheingan Sisters performed "Adieu Privas/Bourée," a song learned from the field recordings of the
Limousin singer and fiddle player
Léon Peyrat. They self-released the album
Start Close In, in September 2024, which was named folk album of the month by
The Guardian newspaper and was listed as number 2 in the paper's top folk albums of the year in December 2024. In 2019, Rheingans debuted a one woman
musical theatre show called
Dispatches on the Red Dress, which was developed with Liam Hurley. The show explored her German grandmother's youth in 1940s
Nazi Germany, with the red dress of the title made for her grandmother to wear at the end of
World War II. The show won an
Edinburgh Fringe First Award. Rheingans also released a
solo album based on the show in 2019, titled
The Lines We Draw Together, with funding from the
PRS Foundation's Women Make Music programme and the
Arts Council England. Rheingans received a
Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2021. == References ==