She has worked in the theatre and broadcasting as well as giving musical performances in Scotland, England, Canada and elsewhere.
[1] Catherine-Ann was born on 21 November 1959 in the Island of Barra, Scotland where she grew up with Scottish Gaelic as her first language.
She moved to the Isle of Mull, where she worked in a bar in Tobermory, but soon joined John McGrath's English-speaking 7:84 theatre company.
Like her subsequent albums, all of the songs on Cànan Nan Gaidheal (The Language of the Gael) (1987) are in Gaelic, and most are traditional.
The Mrs Ackyroyd Band is a loose association of singers who record perform comic parodies of folk music.