Black History Month: Folk songs collected by Angeline Morrison

A collection of folk songs written in Cornwall to mark Black History Month

An unknown African boy drowned off the shores of Scilly and a former slave who found a free life in Cornwall are two of the stories to feature on a new album released in October to commemorate Black History Month.

The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience is the work of Angeline Morrison, a singer-songwriter of mixed heritage who lives near Truro. Having found few songs from the Black perspective in the English folk canon, she wrote her own based on Black characters found around the UK. The resulting collection has been described by BBC Introducing as “dark, unsettling folk that verges on the hymnal”.

Angeline was moved to begin her studies during the first lockdown, following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. This led to widespread protests across the USA and sparked rebellion in the UK, including the toppling of the statue commemorating Bristol slave trader Edward Colston.

The seminal work of African-American sociologist WEB du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), convinced Angeline of the importance of music to enslaved people and their descendants. “They had been robbed of their names, their homelands, their mother tongue, their voice, their dignity - but in music and song, their experiences could be voiced and validated,” she explains. “All the ups and downs and intricacies of life can be found in Black song.”

However, while this tradition is well established in the USA, Angeline struggled to find examples on home turf. The few songs she uncovered during a research stint at Cecil Sharp House depicted Black subjects as the butt of jokes or negative stereotypes: “These weren’t songs I wanted to sing, or hear other people sing. They wouldn’t have been written by Black people, unless it was to order.”

Faced with a dearth of existing material, Angeline flipped the project on its head, researching Black history in the UK – with the help of museums, archives and historians - and writing original material around it. “The idea of significant numbers of Black people in the UK before the 1940s comes as a surprise to a lot of people,” she says, “but there was a minority presence of people from Africa and Asia, both trafficked as part of the transatlantic slave trade and living free lives. There are so very many different stories to tell.”

Unknown African Boy recounts the sad tale of a young lad who died in a shipwreck off the Isles of Scilly while being transported to London in 1830. The Hope was sailing from Cape Coast Castle in what is now Ghana; when the captain mistook the white daymark for St Agnes’ lighthouse, the ship hit the rocks with the loss of all life, including a Dutch officer and the boy.

Was he a servant, or a slave to be sold with the rest of the cargo – palm oil, elephant tusks, silver dollards and gold dust? No-one knows. He is buried in St Martin’s churchyard, and his epitaph reads simple: “In the memory of a young West African boy”.

Of all the stories Angeline researched, this one lingered. “It had a powerful emotional resonance,” she says. “One of the most harrowing things about the slave trade was the horrific abuse of children, and I was struck by the contrast of the costly luxuries that washed up from the wreck alongside his body. I couldn’t get that out of my head.” The resulting song is a moving lullaby in the voice of the boy’s grieving mother.

Slave No More remembers Evaristo Muchovela. Originally from Mozambique, he is thought to have been sold as a slave boy in Rio de Janeiro to Porkellis miner Thomas Johns in 1838. When Johns returned to Cornwall in 1860, Evaristo came with him, and as a free man moved into cabinet making and French polishing.

Evaristo died of TB in 1868, aged 38, and was buried in his former master’s grave in Wendron. The words on his headstone read: “Here lie the master and the slave, side by side within one grave; distinction’s lost and caste is o’er, the slave is now a slave no more.” These are spoken by folk music titan Martin Carthy on Angeline’s recording; her music was composed to recall the Sankey and Moody hymns popular during that era, giving the song a flavour of traditional Cornish Methodism.

Carthy’s appearance is just one happy result of Angeline’s collaboration with his daughter, Eliza Carthy, herself a folk musician of enormous repute. She was so taken with the Sorrow Songs that she offered to produce the album and used her influence to sign it to Topic Records - “an enormous honour”. It was recorded at Cube Studios in Silverwell: “We had lots of fun, which we needed given some of the deeply upsetting subject matter,” says Angeline.

Asked how she feels about her own African ancestry, fractured and erased by the slave trade, she becomes emotional. “The sense of injustice is very deep. The idea of heritage and sense of family, belonging and origin is not available to me and people like me – that feels very harsh.”

She moved to Cornwall from Birmingham in the early 2000s, and describes her experience here as “overwhelmingly but not exclusively positive”, adding: “Being somewhere where you really stand out can cause problems.” The 2011 government census shows that 98.2% of the population in Cornwall is white, and Angeline is active with Black Voices Cornwall, which grew out of the George Floyd movement.

Her own musical influences include English folk singers such as Vashti Bunyan and Anne Briggs. “I was inspired to make the kind of songs they sang, about individuals and people – real historical characters, and imaginary figures from myth and legend. The idea of singing stories, out of love for people so they can be remembered, is common to all human cultures. I wanted to honour our Black ancestors in that way.

“I also wanted to make songs people would want to sing, because hearing people sing together on the UK folk scene is glorious, so I added refrains and choruses for people to join in in the hope of them becoming folk club regulars.”

Who knows, maybe these songs will be sung in 100 years' time. “Wouldn’t that be great?” l The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience by Angeline Morrison is released on Topic Records on October 7.