It was difficult for Gillian Frame to avoid becoming a folk musician. Both of her parents played traditional tunes and sang, her brother blew the bagpipes, and the fiddle Frame still plays was inherited from her great-grandfather. Plus, she was raised on Arran, the most southerly of the large islands off the west coast of Scotland and long a hot spot for Celtic music.

“We had lots of family bands, and my mother and father were involved in running the Arran Folk Festival,” says the 25-year-old Frame, reached in Cork, Ireland, on tour with her band, Back of the Moon. “People would come over from the mainland at weekends just to have sessions in the pubs.”

Frame started out on the fiddle when she was 10, learning from recordings and playing pipe tunes with her brother. She gained a coveted place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, where she got her first taste of formal tuition for both voice and violin. She soon started winning prizes; as the leader of the then–recently formed Back of the Moon she was awarded the BBC2 Young Folk Award in 2000, and shortly afterwards Radio Scotland named her young traditional musician of the year.

“The reward for that was to make an album, and a trip to the Vancouver and Mission folk festivals,” says Frame. “By that time, the band was the thing I was focusing on, so I made the recording with them—and naturally they had to come on the tour with me to Canada.”

Having already made two trips to B.C., Back of the Moon is about to return to our city on the most auspicious day of the calendar for fans of Scottish arts and culture: Robbie Burns Day, which celebrates the birthday of Scotland’s national poet. While there are no songs by the Bard of Ayrshire on Back of the Moon’s latest release, Luminosity , Frame has strong Burns connections. Her father’s side of the family comes from a village just a short distance from the poet’s hometown of Alloway, and a few years ago she and the band were involved in a major recording project, The Complete Songs of Robert Burns .

“There are about 13 or 14 albums in all, covering every song he wrote and including lots of obscure ones,” says Frame. “The whole thing was put together by Dr. Fred Freeman, who did a lot of research and found the older melodies for the songs and different versions of well-known lyrics. There’s also the really bawdy ones that not so many people sing or hear these days. Our guitar player Findlay Napier’s claim to fame is that he’s featured on one of the discs that has a parental advisory sticker on it.”

Look out, Eminem, because it looks like you’ve got some competition.

Back of the Moon plays St. James Hall tonight (January 25).