NASHVILLE singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters is to play Pocklington Arts Centre instead after next month's Beverley Folk Festival was called off.

Peters was to have headlined the festival's Friday line-up but her East Yorkshire diary for June 15 will now cross out Beverley and add Pocklington, where she topped the Platform Festival bill at The Old Station in July 2016.

Venue manager James Duffy says: "We're delighted to be able to welcome such a world-renowned artist as Gretchen Peters to our already busy summer programme of live events. It means that those fans who were perhaps left disappointed by the cancellation of this year’s Beverley Folk Festival won’t necessarily have to miss out on seeing Gretchen perform live in this corner of the world after all."

Peters will be touring Britain in May and June to coincide with the May 18 release of her new studio album, Dancing With The Beast, on Proper Records. May 30 sends her to Leeds City Varieties Music Hall, and Pocklington will be the last of 16 dates before she makes a brief return for two folk festivals in Cornwall and Shrewsbury in August.

Dancing With The Beast puts female characters to the fore, from teenage girls to old women, and in the wake of the 2017 Women's March and #MeToo Movement bookending her writing time, Peters knew a feminist perspective would be at the core of the record. "You can trace the feminist DNA in my songwriting back to [my song] Independence Day and probably before," she says. "The thing that 2017 did is just put it front and centre."

Peters was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in October 2014 by singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell, who praised her as both a songwriter and a poet who sings as beautifully as she writes. To prove the point, she has penned songs for artists as diverse as Etta James, Bonnie Raitt, The Neville Brothers, Patty Loveless, George Strait, Bryan Adams and Faith Hill.

Her 2015 album, Blackbirds, debuted at number one on the UK country chart and made the Top 40 UK pop chart too, going on to win International Album of the Year and Song of the Year awards in a year when the Telegraph named Peters as as one of the greatest 60 female singer-songwriters of all time.

Her special guest on June 15 will be Kim Richey. Tickets cost £25 on 01759 301547 or at pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk