We are pleased to have finished our National Lottery funded project – not that we didn’t enjoy doing it! it was great fun and now it’s over we really feel we have achieved something special. Over the course of 12 months we ran 11 interactive performances at various venues across East Sussex and met up with people from all walks of life. Groups and organisations we worked with included Compass Community Arts, Crowborough U3A, Grovelands School, East Sussex Libraries, WayfinderWoman Trust, Rushlake Green Little Arts Festival, Hailsham Festival, Tide Mills Choir and, of course, Summer Trifle who commissioned the project .
The aim of the project was to gather stories from people in the Wealden area and across East Sussex, run accessible and interactive events for all ages where the audience can join in with the song writing process. We would write songs based on some of the stories gathered in true folk tradition to keep the stories alive. All the stories are now published on a dedicated website that we created, yourstoriesinsong.co.uk . The response to the project was amazing and at the time of writing there are 87 stories on the website but we are happy to add more as they come our way. It would be great to have a round 100 on there! If you want to add a story, see the link below.
You can read about some of the Your Stories In Song events as they were included in our 60 by 60 challenge.
Frontier Bar ; Crowborough ; Livestream – watch the actual Livestream here; Pickhams ; Hailsham Library ; Newhaven ; Rushlake Green ; Hailsham Festival ; Grovelands School
In total we wrote 10 songs for the project (links to videos of some):
Molly Mothballs ; Return Of The Bloodied Crow ; Buttons ; Roundabout Jack ; Paddling Along ; Time And Tide ; Liquid Gold ; Not All In The Mind ; Tale Of A Storm ; Chiddingly Onion Pie Murder. We have performed most of these publicly and are working on arrangements for Not All In The Mind and Tale Of A Storm ready to perform them soon.
Our intention is to record all 10 songs and release them, if not on an album, as singles (we’ve already released return Of The Bloodied Crow) . At the moment we are considering ways to fund an album and a continuation of the project under the name of The Jays Nest Project.
Would you like to contribute a story to the project, to be published on the website? Go to: https://www.yourstoriesinsong.co.uk/#submit