A Shirt Box Full of Songs: The Autobiography

by Barbara Dickson

From singing to the postman when she was less than two years old to her annual sell-out tours in the 2000s, Barbara Dickson has been captivating her fans for the best part of sixty years.  In her autobiography she describes the joys of growing up in Fife in the fifties, of moving to Edinburgh at seventeen to find her place in the world and the struggles of trying to make a living on the Scottish folk scene. Despite becoming Scotland’s bestselling solo artist in the seventies and eighties and having huge hits such as ‘I Know Him So Well’ and ‘Caravan Song’, Barbara was not content to have just a successful singing career.  She turned to acting.  A regular on prime-time television, Barbara also took to musicals, making Blood Brothers and Spend, Spend, Spend her own.  Her time onstage earned her many acting accolades but her pursuit of perfection lead to complete exhaustion from which she fought hard to recover. Barbara’s is a warm, fascinating story that encompasses the best of British music, stage and television and above all tells the story of an ordinary woman with an extraordinary voice.

186 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2009

About the author

Barbara Ruth Dickson, OBE is a Scottish singer whose hits include "I Know Him So Well", "Answer Me" and "January February". Dickson has placed fifteen albums in the UK Albums Chart from 1977 to date, and had a number of hit singles, including four which reached the Top 20 in the UK Singles Chart. The Scotsman newspaper has described her as Scotland's best-selling female singer in terms of the numbers of hit chart singles and albums she has achieved in the UK since 1976.

She is also a two-time Olivier Award-winning actress, with roles including Viv Nicholson in the musical Spend Spend Spend, and she was the original Mrs. Johnston in Willy Russell's long-running musical Blood Brothers. On TV she starred as Anita Braithwaite in Band of Gold.