«June Tabor is one of our day’s most commanding and distinctive voices and interpreters of traditional and contemporary song. She has a voice that undoes the usual cultural and critical trammels that bind the beast called Folk. After all, folk music, like religion (as distinct from faith), has been bound and hogtied by idealism, literalism, pronouncements of heresy and ownership squabbles from the Enlightenment and Machine Age through to Modern Times. Like those of her finest fellow confederates and international fellow-travels in the genre, June’s accomplishments and fluidity of approach have created a body of Art with a capital A. But when all is said, done and sung, she is the personification of the singer and the song. Naturally, she is primarily seen as a “folksinger”, a “folk revivalist” or some title with “folk” in it because she has long operated in acoustic music contexts and because, more often than not, folk is used in its most journeyed catch-all sense of folk being whatever people want to be. First and foremost however, June Tabor is an extraordinary teller of tales. She may claim that is a love of the rhyme rather than tales from the stave that motivate her, but her marriage of meaning and music is nonpareil (…) she has repeatedly experimented in areas far removed from the “confines” in which she is generally pigeonholed of perceived to operate. (…) And that is, regardless of the musical genre, whenever you listen to June Tabor, she can never be mistaken for any other voice. It has nothing to do with the vocal register – her voice is unique – and everything to do with a voice that sings folksong, chanson and beyond.»

Ken Hunt, in Always (2004)

 All Our Trades Are Gone