A collaboration between Angeline Morrison, Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne and Jon Bickley, released in 2024 following the 250th anniversary of ‘Amazing Grace’ and charting these of enslavement and redemption, Grace Will Lead Me Home figured in many of the year’s Top 10 folk album lists.
This year marks the 300th birthday of the hymn’s writer, John Newton, and the trio has reunited for a stage show set to tour the UK in October, Black History Month, following festival performances at Sidmouth, Broadstairs and Greenbelt in August.
However with narration by John Palmer, who produced, scripted and narrated the stories of Sabine Baring Gould for last year’s Ghosts, Werewolves and Countryfolk tour as well as 2022/23’s From Pub to Pulpit Cathedral tour celebrating Vaughan Williams’s folk songs and hymns, this isn’t just about Newton.
Rather it tells two incredibly parallel stories, his, a slave trading ship captain who “saw the light” and became a preacher and an abolitionist, mentoring William Wilberforce, and that of the somewhat lesser known but equally influential Olaudah Equiano.
An African from what is now southern Nigeria, he was kidnapped and enslaved as a child in West Africa, shipped to the Caribbean and sold to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more and renamed Gustavus Vassa, by which he was known for the rest of his life, before purchasing his freedom in 1766 from his then owner, Robert King, an American Quaker merchant from Philadelphia. Eventually settling In London, he became a leader of the Sons of Africa abolition movement, which brought him into the same circles as Newton and Wilberforce.
His 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, was such a success that nine editions were published during his life, translated into both Dutch and German, and helped secure passage of the British Slave Trade Act 1807, which abolished the slave trade.
The coincidences and parallels between the contrasting but intertwined lives of the two men will be explored in the show through Palmer’s narrative, readings from original writing, and songs both from ‘Grace Will Lead Me Home’ and new material written for the show.
Artists’ website: https://invisiblefolk.com/grace-will-lead-me-home
‘Press Gang Song’ – official video:
Grace Will Lead Me Home tour dates:
6 August Sidmouth Folk Festival
12 August Broadstairs Folk Week
24 August Kettering Greenbelt Festival
14 October Milton Keynes Stables
15 October Croydon Minster
17 October Devoran Village Hall
18 October Wolverhampton Arts Centre
19 October St Albans, St Saviours Church
22 October Hull Minster
31 October Nailsea Folk Club
13 December Wotton under Edge Under the Edge Arts Centre
15 December Exeter Phoenix
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