Supernatural Ballads Social Sing with Shinbone Alley
Performers
Location
About
TEMPO Concert Hall
Doors 6:30 PM | Show 7:00 PM
Thursday, November 12
Join singer and ballad keeper Alex Harvey and Shinbone Alley for a special group sing, lit by oil lamps and the dying light of the season. Hear old songs of monsters, murder, and mayhem, accompanied sporadically by Harvey on TEMPO’s original 1907 Emmons Howard pipe organ. At every performance, Harvey teaches the audience the choruses verse by verse, so by the end of the night the room is singing as one crew.
On All Hallows, the hills darken with old stories. In this witching window, traditional ballads come alive: the jealous sister who drowns her kin, the revenant lover who knocks at midnight, the ship’s carpenter haunted by the Demon Lover, and spectral fiddles and harps strung from bone and hair. Murder ballads and haunted airs, once whispered by the fireside, are given voice beneath the shroud of dead leaves. Forget watching a horror movie—these songs will spook you to the marrow, the perfect activity for the ghosts’ corner of the year.
Kids 10 and up are welcome. Parents, please be aware of your child’s fear-factor limit: these are very scary stories!
About the band
Shinbone Alley is the old-world folk project of multi-instrumentalist and folklorist Alex Harvey, dedicated to the street ballads and sea songs of the 18th and 19th centuries—shanties, broadsheet ballads, come-all-ye’s, whaling serenades, lovesick dirges, and haunted supernatural airs. Named for the legendary tavern in the shanty “Bully in the Alley” and for sailors’ lanes of the same name in ports from Bermuda to Lower Manhattan, the project began as a duo with Jordan Shapiro and has grown into a collective with a rotating cast of musicians and yarn-spinners, including Aldo Lavaggi, Jerry Bryant, Alan Short, The Jonson Girls, Brad Lail, and others. Alex is an advisor to the Connecticut Sea Music and Tradition Association.
Tickets
- $15 community / $20 standard / $25 supporter
- All tickets are general admission. Choose the ticket that feels right for you; every option supports the artists and instructors as well as TEMPO Performing Arts Center programming.
- Appropriate for kids 10 and up only; parents, please use discretion.
- Beer, wine, and cider bar offered.