Sam Hodgson is a community musician working across Yorkshire and the North, creating music that connects people to place. He leads projects in settings from prisons to refugee centres, often with communities who are hardest to reach. Following commissions from Manasamitra, City Connect and the University of Huddersfield, his Masters thesis (Songs of Place) takes the lives of ordinary people past and present and puts them in the spotlight.

About his commission for SlawitSHOP! he says, “It must have felt, to many locals, as if Jane Annie Townend had always been at 12 Carr Lane. 

There are similar characters on the road now, who seem inseparable to our relationship with the shop they guard. Maybe we don’t know their names, their lives or their hobbies but they sustain us – serve our veg with care, warm our coffee with a smile, select toys for our children, cut the meat as particularly as we asked for it. 

And yet one day they and us will be gone – our lives in no history book, our actions forgotten. This song, reminiscent of Paul Simon’s Graceland, takes us through this thought – that all of us and everything we’ve done will one day disappear. 

It is a celebration of life and acceptance of impermanence, with a jaggedy beat and a funky bass line.”

Sam recorded the song upstairs at Ryder and Dutton, where Jane lived and died.