Sussex and Surrey music lovers are invited to join us on Saturday 28th March for a celebration of Horsham’s own Henry Burstow, the renowned Victorian folk song collector, writer, shoe-maker and bell ringer. We plan to bring the beautiful Church Centre in Horsham’s historic Causeway to life with a programme of Sussex and Surrey folk songs from the collections of Henry Burstow and other prominent locals Ralph Vaughan Williams and Lucy Broadwood. Timeline Choir will be joined by soloist Susannah Austin, a Sussex born singer-songwriter who has been described as having “soaring, ethereal female vocals that bring tons of warmth” (Pure Groove), and likened to Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny and Stevie Nicks.

Born in Horsham in 1826, Henry Burstow was best known for his vast repertoire of 420 folk songs, many of which were collected from him during the folksong revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He had a “tenacious memory” and could recite every one of these songs by heart! It was his collection of folk songs that bought him to the attention of Lucy Broadwood and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who recorded many of his songs on a phonograph. He is also the author of Reminiscences of Horsham, which gives a lively picture of life in Horsham in the mid-nineteenth century, and a couple of excerpts from his book will feature during the evening. Henry Burstow wrote in his book “In 1840 I was apprenticed to Jim Vaughan, who lived in the Causeway, to learn the boot and shoe-making trade. (…) So notorious were [my co-workers] as drinkers that when I went into the trade my mother’s friends said to her, “Ah! Harry’s done for now.”  We were inspired by Henry Burstow’s vibrant character and his entertaining anecdotes, as well as his amazing songs, which span the whole range of human emotion from light-hearted and funny, to poignant and tragic.