Offa’s Dyke rises like a strong backbone behind June Tabor’s house. It’s a striking, physical reminder — much stronger than the Welcome to Wales sign at the bridge at the end of the road that leads to her home — that this largely unsung singer inhabits the borders. In more than 30 years of performing, Tabor has made several daring raids across the traditional boundaries of English folk music, pushing the genre to places where some would not dare — bringing jazz standards into her sets, collecting songs from Germany, the Appalachian mountains and Derby, and wrapping them all in a warm, deep, dark and inimitable voice. Along the way, she has drawn countless admirers, from Elvis Costello to Stephen Fry, and this year has won a clutch of awards.

Sitting at the huge open fireside of her quirky Shropshire homestead, totally at ease, with her two friendly dachshunds — Johannes and Franz — nestling on the sofa beside her, she tucks into chocolate biscuits and tea, and ruminates on her newly bestowed status as Radio 2’s folk singer of the year. “My mother describes me as a folk singer, as if I have some strange disease,” she says. “But I’m just a singer. A singer of songs that tell stories.”

She’s right. The record-buying public is so fixated on how to categorise music, putting any traditional tunes we don’t understand into a box marked “folk”, that we are at risk of missing the music itself. Tabor has sung her way through traditional songs and emotional ballads, and has arrived at a place where she is less folk singer, more chanteuse. Like Brel, or even Piaf, she understands the power of chanson and brings her inter- pretation and understanding of words to the music in gripping performances.

The result is compelling musical storytelling — much stronger live than it is on record — that can transform and transfix the listener. “I see songs as parallel to good short-story writing,” she says. “Whatever form the story takes, it sucks you in, and while the story is happening, you are in there. When you come out the other side, you are changed in some way by the experience of being inside the song.” As if on cue, Johannes — or is it Franz? — snores loudly, eliciting an affectionate chuckle from June.

The way June discovered and developed her voice is a story in itself. She sang, she says, because she was too lazy to learn an instrument. Couldn’t do with all the practice. Without any musical training, she is still learning how to use her vocal cords and phrase a song. After experimenting with unaccompanied songs at the folk clubs near her childhood home in Warwick, she went to Oxford to study French and Latin, and, as well as appearing on University Challenge, immersed herself in the folk-music scene there. After inviting Maddy Prior to her folk club, she struck up a friendship with the woman who was to become the voice of Steeleye Span.

They went on to record two albums together under the name of the Silly Sisters. Graduation was followed by a stint as a librarian at Oxford University’s Taylorian Institute library, where she had to retrieve books from the vast stacks that lie in miles of tunnels under the streets of the town. She used the acoustics of the vaults to practise her tunes. From Oxford, she went to London for more librarianship, juggling the Dewey decimal system with venues such as the Fighting Cocks pub in Kingston, where she performed. Then came an interruption — a five-year spell where she was all but lost to music, working with her then husband as a chef in his restaurant. When catering and the marriage faltered, she turned her attention to music full time. “It was hard getting back into it,” she says. “Most people thought I had died or emigrated.”

Some years on, her most recent and well-reviewed album, An Echo of Hooves, sees her flexing her vocal muscle and wrapping it around some stark ballads, including Sir Patrick Spens — a tale of a shipwrecked Scottish lord. “What a story!” she exclaims. “I can see all the images from the words so clearly, like a cinema in my head.”

Having worked in the past with some great musicians, including the guitarist Martin Simpson, she has gathered together some fine collaborators and developed strong musical relationships. In the case of the violinist Mark Emerson, of the sparky ensemble 1651, it has extended beyond the musical and into sharing the idyllic Shropshire home with dogs, cats and four French hens freely scratching at the lawn of the finely tended garden. Evidently, she isn’t the only one in the house pecking at the borders.

Tabor tours the UK in June; visit www.junetabor.co.uk for details. She appears in concert on BBC4 on Friday at 10pm

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