Traditional tunes and folk songs of the South Downs

Southern English musical treasures intimately presented and performed by the members of Goblin Band joined by Shovel Dance Collective's Mataio Austin Dean of Hampshire and special guest Bob Lewis of Sussex.

Mataio Austin Dean is an artist, poet, musician, and activist from Portsmouth, Hampshire. Austin Dean sings folksong primarily from the South of England, focussing on songs from Hampshire. He sees his singing of folksong as part of a decolonial process: centring notions of locality, solidarity, and international exchange, and rejecting totalising, imperialistic, nationalistic structures of Britishness and whiteness.

Bob Lewis was born in 1935 in Heyshott, near Midhurst in West Sussex, and has been collecting and singing the folk songs of England his whole life and has been an important figure of traditional music for many decades. Bob learned songs from his mother at home and in many of the great pubs of the Southern counties alongside some of the region's great folk singers such as Bob Copper and the Copper family, George Belton, Gordon & Mabs Hall, Scan Tester and more. We are happy to say after all these years, Bob is still singing and we are honoured to have him join us.

Description supplied by the event organiser.