Biography
Hannah Sanders is a British folk musician from Norwich. She also records as Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage.
Sanders tentatively took up the guitar in her late teens. At the time she was travelling in the family bus and singing folk songs on the streets of Europe. With The Dunns, as they were known, Sanders travelled across Europe as part of the array of street performers making the annual exodus of European trails.
The family eventually settled back in Norfolk where they worked as street performers, at times for English Heritage and across UK festivals with their unique style of unaccompanied folk singing. She left music for a while and went on to Norwich School of Art & Design to study with poet George Szirtes. She stayed on to complete a pioneering PhD on contemporary teenage witchcraft. After this she travelled to America where she lived for a time in New England, teaching and publishing.
It was at the tail end of her time in New England that she made a chance encounter with the mountain dulcimer that led her to take up the instrument as an alternative to her guitar accompaniments. At a chance meeting at an Irish session in Boston Sanders met Liz Simmons (Low Lily, EVA) and the two began to sing together.
Sanders returned to the UK and on a whim took her dulcimer to the Black Fen Folk Club in Cambridge to sing solo. It was here that she met Ben Savage who was at the club on an evening off from touring with The Willows. Their musical empathy led to Savage producing Sanders's 2015 solo debut "Charms Against Sorrow".
In turn, this led to Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage.
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