About this event
Doors 8pm, Show 8:30pom $20 On all hallows the hills darken with old stories. Join singer and ballad keeper, Shinbone Alley for an evening lit by oil lamps and the dying light of the season, as we set out to hear the old songs of monster, murder and mayhem. 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, the spectral fiddles and harps strung from bone and hair. Murder ballads and haunted aires, 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. 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 aires. At every performance Harvey teaches the audience the choruses verse by verse, so that by the end of the night the room is singing as one crew. Named for the legendary tavern named in the shanty "Bully in the Alley," and for the sailors' lanes of that 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.