Soul · Pop · Country · Blues
The Lost Tapes Series
Ruth M Mowbray was an American singer whose music moved between soul, pop, country and blues, but whose career never quite became the one it should have been.
She began recording at a time when female singers were expected to fit a very particular mould. Ruth could sing about heartbreak, longing and desire — as long as the person at the centre of those songs was a man.
Increasingly, she refused.
Ruth was gay, and she wanted her music to acknowledge that rather than hide it. She did not want to change pronouns, invent boyfriends or turn women she had loved into men simply to make a song easier to sell.
That decision came at a cost.
Recordings were shelved. Releases disappeared from schedules. Opportunities became harder to find. Ruth was repeatedly encouraged to return to safer material and to keep her private life out of her songs. Instead, she became more determined to record the stories she actually wanted to tell.
Eventually, the industry largely moved on without her.
But Ruth kept recording.
Across the years she left behind songs about love, regret, silence, missed chances and relationships that could not always be spoken about openly. Some were demos. Some were abandoned sessions. Others appear to have been finished recordings that simply never received a release.
Ruth died in 2024, aged 87.
What remained was a collection of recordings spanning different moments of her life and different corners of American music — songs carrying traces of soul, country, blues and the great singer-songwriters she grew up around.
They now form The Lost Tapes Series.
The series is not an attempt to rewrite Ruth’s life into something neater than it was. Some of the songs are explicitly about women. Others are simply songs of heartbreak, loneliness, anger or love. Together, they reveal an artist who spent much of her career being asked to disguise herself and who, whenever she could, chose not to.
Decades after some of these recordings were made, Ruth M Mowbray can finally be heard on her own terms.
No changed pronouns. No invented men. No apology.