Supernatural Ballads with Shinbone Alley: Centuries-Old Monster, Murder, and Ghost Songs

Folklorist, multi-instrumentalist, and theater director Alex Harvey will lead a lamplit evening of monster, murder, and ghost songs of the British Isles and early America—the stories people once told to get through the longest nights of the year and that make modern horror look tame. Kids age 12+ are welcome, but parents please be aware of your own child’s fear factor limit, as these are some scary stories.

“A horror film does the imagining for you. A ballad makes you do it yourself, and what you imagine is always worse,” says Harvey. “These songs lasted 400 years because people couldn’t get them out of their heads. That’s the scariest thing about them. They’re built to infect you, and they work.”

The songs crossed the Atlantic with the settlers and took root in New England’s hill towns and river valleys. Collectors like Helen Hartness Flanders were still recording them from farm kitchens in Vermont well into the 20th century. They found good soil here, in a region of Puritan graveyards carved with winged skulls, of witch trials, and of 19th century villages that dug up their own dead to stop them feeding on the living. Hearing these songs in the Hudson Valley in late October, with the leaves down and the stone walls showing through the woods, is hearing them in the landscape that kept them alive.

“Shinbone Alley” is Harvey’s old-world folk project dedicated to the street ballads and sea songs of the 16th through 19th centuries—shanties, broadsheet ballads, come-all-ye’s, whaling serenades, lovesick dirges, and haunted supernatural airs. He plays bouzouki, harmonium, mandriolla, bowed banjo, and guitar. Trained in filmmaking and environmental theater, he makes work that uses old songs and stories as live rituals of gathering. He performs with The ReMemberers and the Latin folk duo Pueblos Tristes and he is the arts programmer at Race Brook Lodge and the founder of the Down County Jump festival. As a grief doula and end-of-life ceremonialist, he brings an unusual closeness to the ghost songs: they are, at heart, songs about how the living and the dead keep each other company. He lives in Great Barrington, MA.

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