Acclaimed songwriter’s deeply researched live song cycle exploring England’s role in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people comes to Middleton Hall on Thursday 8th October, with Jeffrey Boakye returning as narrator.
A four-year investigation into some of the less comfortably remembered corners of British history comes to Hull this October when acclaimed singer-songwriter Reg Meuross performs Stolen From God at Middleton Hall.
The concert takes place on Thursday 8 October, with doors at 6pm and the show at 7.30pm. Meuross is joined by concertina virtuoso Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, kora player and griot Modou Ndiaye Cissokho, and acclaimed author and broadcaster Jeffrey Boakye, who returns as narrator for the Hull performance.
Across original songs, live narration and the distinctive combination of English folk instrumentation and West African kora, Stolen From God explores England’s involvement in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people and the human stories contained within it.
Meuross began researching the project in 2018. His investigations took him through churches, country estates, ports, family trees and parish records, uncovering stories involving sailors and merchants, vicars and politicians, enslaved people, abolitionists and resistance. The resulting songs range across figures including John Hawkins, Edward Colston and Olaudah Equiano, alongside the wider systems of commerce, class and inherited wealth that connected England to enslavement.
Hull is an especially resonant stop. Meuross already has a strong relationship with the city through 12 Silk Handkerchiefs, his song cycle about Hull’s 1968 triple-trawler disaster and the campaign led by Lilian Bilocca and her fellow “headscarf revolutionaries”. Hull is also the birthplace of abolitionist William Wilberforce.
This is the fourth year Meuross has toured Stolen From God during Black History Month.
“Years of writing and research have revealed to me some remarkable stories of defiance and bravery, courage and endurance,” says Meuross. “As my research for Stolen From God progressed, I realised how little I knew about Black History in Britain; how little I’d been taught growing up; how little I knew of Empire and how it was made.
“I hope with my songs and this project to make a useful contribution by bringing some light to a complex issue, and another way of hearing these stories.”
The Guardian called the album “ambitious, often unsettling”, while Americana UK described it as “one of the best folk albums I’ve heard in a long time”. BBC Radio Scotland’s Iain Anderson said Meuross had “never made a more important or more deeply considered and researched album”.
For the Hull performance, the words are given another dimension by Jeffrey Boakye, author of Black, Listed, Musical Truth and I Heard What You Said. Boakye has previously narrated Stolen From God in Hull and returns for this Black History Month performance at Middleton Hall.
HULL – THURSDAY 8th OCTOBER
Middleton Hall, University of Hull
Doors 6pm / show 7:30pm
Narrator: Jeffrey Boakye
Tickets: £20
Tickets & tour information
LISTEN / WATCH
🎧 Listen: Good Morning Mr Colston
🎧 Stream Stolen From God in full
🎥 Watch: Good Morning Mr Colston
🎥 Watch: I Bought Myself An African
OCTOBER TOUR
Fri 2 Oct – Bridgwater Arts Centre – narrator Karen Gledhill
Sat 3 Oct – West End Centre, Aldershot
Wed 7 Oct – Kitchen Garden Cafe, Birmingham – narrator Tim Walker
Thu 8 Oct – Middleton Hall, Hull – narrator Jeffrey Boakye
Fri 9 Oct – St Mary’s Church, Todmorden, West Yorkshire