YORK Theatre Royal is not the only arts venue in The Press circulation area to have undergone rather more than a facelift.

So too has Pocklington Arts Centre, where the management team of Janet Farmer and James Duffy has overseen improvements to the foyer and the creation of a spacious new bar and acoustic performance space upstairs to complement the main auditorium and studio cum gallery.

No work was necessary in the auditorium, a wonderfully welcoming converted cinema that still shows films too and has had performer after performer praising its atmosphere.

To that list you can add American country singer Laura Cantrell, on her Pocklington debut, as she settled into "this lovely little jewel of a place" after opening with Pile Of Woe from her 2000 debut Not The Tremblin' Kind, newly imprinted on vinyl for the first time.

Thursday night's focus, in the company of lead guitarist Mark Spencer and electric bass player Jordan Caress, would be on both the cream of that John Peel-championed album and a new archive collection of BBC studio sessions and on-air performances for Peel and Bob Harris from 2000-2005. All flavoured with stories behind the songs, told with the insights that have made Cantrell a sage radio presenter in New York, where this southern singer-songwriter from Nashville relocated but never lost her roots.

Cantrell self-deprecatingly called herself a "music nerd" at one point, but it was a joy to share in her knowledge, her recollections of Peel days, her sad-eyed reflections on the loss of Merle Haggard, another great oak to have fallen this year. Queen Of The Coast, her paean to Haggard's ex-wife, Bonnie Owens, took on a new poignancy too.

Not all the highs came from Canttrell's earlier recordings. 2011's Kitty Wells Dresses, with its celebration of an early country queen, shone out too, as did the leaping joy of Can't Wait and her song for the women in her life, 2013's All The Girls Are Complicated.

Did she unveil a new song as she sort of promised in her interview with The Press? Well, did she? Can't Tell A Soul. No, really, that was the title of the nascent number "just out of the oven" that made its shaky-legged debut to close Laura's quietly majestic night of country blues and bliss.

Charles Hutchinson

Laura Cantrell plays Leeds Brudenell Social Club on Tuesday, May 10