Grace Will Lead Me Home

Grace Will Lead Me Home tells the story of two men whose lives followed astonishingly similar paths, but whose experiences were astoundingly different.

Both were eleven when home-life ended. Both had sea-faring careers. Both found religion. And both became revered and influential celebrities in the campaign for the abolition of slavery. One was a slave trader. The other was a slave.

Today, one is remembered for a song. The other is almost completely forgotten John Newton was the captain of a slave trading ship who saw the light and became a preacher. He wrote many hymns, including Amazing Grace, and later became a prominent abolitionist,
mentoring William Wilberforce. Oluadah Equiano was a kidnapped African , shipped to America and sold. He bought his freedom,
came to London where he was a founder of the Sons of Africa abolition group, which brought him into the same influential circles as Newton, Wilberforce and other abolitionists.

The tensions and contradictions in their stories, and how much or little we know about them both in 2025 raises many questions.
The show is inspired by one of 2024’s most critically-acclaimed folk albums, Grace Will Lead Me Home, which featured in Mojo’s and The Morning Star’s Top Ten. It explores the contrasting but intertwined story of both of them through their original writings, the
words of their contemporaries and new and old songs. It is the latest chapter of Jon Bickley’s three-year Arts Council-funded project on the significance and contradictions of Amazing Grace and years of research into Black Folk Music in Britain by Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne.

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Angeline Morrison is among the most significant voices in folk music. She has studied the history and experienced the legacy of the unexamined past of Black Folk Music in Britain. Her albums Brown Girl and The 2022 Guardian Folk Album of the Year The Sorrow Songs identified and celebrated these elements of folk previously ignored. Her latest album Ophelia puts its finger on the pulse of old English summer spookiness and dreams essential to folk music.

Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne is a maestro. His concertina playing has lit up concerts as part of Granny’s Attic, a solo performer and in collaborations with artists such as Reg Meuross and the Sorrow Songs Band. He was also commissioned to produce an educational resource on the history of Black Singers and Folk Ballads. His much-lauded and joyful 2024 album, Play Up The Music,
was inspired by that resource material.

Jon Bickley is a songwriter and folk singer who invited Angeline and Cohen to join the Grace Will Lead Me Home project marking the 250th anniversary of the writing of Amazing produced the album of the same name. He is a poet, the presenter of The Invisible Folk Club radio show and podcast. Among his recordings is an album of Newton’s Olney Hymns.

John Palmer is a narrator and script writer. He produced, scripted and narrated the stories of Sabine Baring Gould for last year’s Ghosts, Werewolves and Countryfolk tour with Jim Causley and Miranda Sykes. Before that he produced, wrote and directed the 2022/23 From Pub to Pulpit Cathedral tour celebrating Vaughan Williams’s folk songs and hymn tunes with Paul Hutchinson;
Anna Tam and Broomdasher.