Wild nightingales will be among the guest artists when the Mercury Prize-nominated folk star Sam Lee brings his acclaimed SINGING WITH NIGHTINGALES event to Exeter's The Phoenix arts centre on Wednesday 9 May (8pm) - combining music and story-telling with a live link to woods where the birds are in full courtship sing.

The evening is a concert version of the campfire nights which the roots music promoter, The Nest Collective, has been running at nightingale sites in south east England since 2015 and which are happening again this Spring in Kent and Sussex.

For the Exeter event Sam Lee will be joined by two West Country-based musicians - Chartwell Dutiro, a vocalist and mbira maestro, and by the internationally touring mulit-instrumentalists Francesca Simmons - and also via a live link to one of the UK’s last remaining strongholds of the bird widely believed possess one of Nature’s finest voices.

Sam Lee says: “The song of the nightingale has been captivating human hearts and imaginations since ancient times but the numbers visiting Britain are in decline, and it is very rare to hear them now even in the countryside.  The aim of our events is to let more people experience the timeless magic of nightingale song and make them part of one of the rarest of concerts – a human/bird duet.”

Tickets for SINGING WITH NIGHTINGALES: LIVE are £16 each and can be booked by telephoning 01392 667 080 4040, or by visiting: www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/.

The event is one of only seven being staged in the UK this Spring and is a companion to a series of campfire events taking place every weekend from April 20 to May 26 in Kent and Sussex. For more details of the indoor and outdoor programme, please see: www.singingwithnightingales.com; find Singing With Nightingales on Facebook &/or follow @samleesong/@NestFolk on Twitter.

SINGING WITH NIGHTINGALES is a production of The Nest Collective, a BBC Folk Award-winning network of folk, world and new music performers and venues, set up by Sam Lee in 2006 and supported by Arts Council England, using National Lottery funding. The series forms part of the RSPB’s Festival of Nightingales and the campaign to raise awareness of how nightingale numbers are falling.