Alex Harvey’s Shinbone Alley Sings about Monsters, Murders, and Ghosts at Spencertown Academy

Friday, October 30, 7:30pm | Spencertown, NY

Folklorist, multi-instrumentalist, and theater director Alex Harvey presents “Supernatural Ballads with Shinbone Alley” at Spencertown Academy Arts Center the night before Halloween. The program is monster, murder, and ghost songs from England and early America. These are the stories people once told to get through the longest nights of the year. The Academy says children 12 and older are welcome but warns parents to consider their child’s tolerance for fear, since the stories are scary.

Harvey says the ballads have lasted 400 years because they’re “built to infect you, and they work.” The songs crossed the Atlantic with settlers and took root in New England’s hill towns and river valleys, and collectors like Helen Hartness Flanders were still recording them in Vermont farm kitchens well into the 20th century. The Academy ties them to the region’s own history of Puritan graveyards carved with winged skulls, witch trials, and 19th-century villages that dug up their dead.

“Shinbone Alley” is Harvey’s project devoted to the street ballads and sea songs of the 16th through 19th centuries, including shanties, broadsheet ballads, whaling serenades, and haunted airs. He plays bouzouki, harmonium, mandriolla, bowed banjo, and guitar. Harvey also performs with The ReMemberers and the Latin folk duo Pueblos Tristes, and he is the arts programmer at Race Brook Lodge and founder of the Down County Jump festival. He works as a grief doula and end-of-life ceremonialist, which he says shapes how he treats the ghost songs, as songs about how the living and the dead keep each other company. He lives in Great Barrington.

Spencertown Academy Arts Center, 790 Route 203, Spencertown, NY. Tickets at viewcy.com or 518-392-3693.