present Ghosts, Werewolves and Countryfolk
the Songs and stories of Sabine Baring-Gould
Heath Street Baptist Church, Hampstead
Friday 25th October
Doors 7:30pm, Live Show 8:00pm
Advance tickets £20
Six-time BBC Folk Awards nominee Jim Causley and Miranda Sykes of Award-Winning Show of Hands and Daphne’s Flight come together for the first time to celebrate the centenary of a Victorian superstar through his music and stories.
Sabine Baring-Gould was a giant of his time. He was a top ten best-selling novelist; the writer of what is still the go-to book on werewolves; author of a nerve-tingling book of ghost stories; storyteller of the Norse Myths of Iceland; compiler of a classic Dartmoor history book and composer of the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers.
But he says the most important thing he did in his life was to collect songs from the countryfolk of Devon and Cornwall. A pioneer collector, starting a decade before Sharp and Vaughan Williams, he amassed more than 2000 songs.
Miranda, Jim and narrator John Palmer, director of the critically-acclaimed Vaughan Williams anniversary “From Pub to Pulpit” Cathedral tour, interweave some of those songs with anecdotes from his own astonishing life and stories from his impressive array of books.
This tribute aims to make audiences smile, gasp and sing along as they hear how:
A ragamuffin fiddler’s favourite tune lived on in his instrument after he died (Bold General Wolfe)
A cottage was built in a day on the moor for a penniless newly married couple (Cottage Well Thatched With Straw)
The eerie mysteries of Wil O’ The Wisp and his graveyard trips (The Blue Flame)
Bram Stoker took ideas from Sabine for Dracula And ….. How Sabine became Sherlock Holmes’s God Father.