[2][3] Her debut album Raw But Tender (1973) was recorded at Nova Sound Studios in the UK for Epic when she was 19 years old, using the folk-blues idiom she was more accustomed to.
The album was produced by Mick Glossop and Stuart Cowell, with Albert Lee on Dobro guitar,[4] Marie Goossens on harp, Frank Ricotti (percussion), and Pat Donaldson (bass) and Gerry Conway (drums) from Fotheringay among the session musicians.
[5] It featured the autobiographical single "Give Her The Day", about her father's early death and her mother's emigration to New Zealand, which received some airplay on BBC Radio 1 but did not chart.
[4] Whitren agreed to a television appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test,[7] and gigged in support of the album for a year, joining tours with John McLaughlin, Tom Paxton, Loudon Wainwright and others, and one-off shows with Sly and the Family Stone, Genesis and Roy Harper.
They became closely associated with the new age music and arts scenes at Glastonbury (Dove Studios, The Phoenix Project) from the late 1970s,[9][10] with the rural commune at Clos du Pont in Brittany in the 1980s and afterwards, and with the Findhorn Community in Moray, Scotland.