Welcome to the sixteenth episode of The Thunder Mutters, featuring 'February ' from John Clare's 'The Shepherd's Calendar’, performed by Adam Horovitz, and interspersed with tunes from Clare’s tune manuscripts performed by Becky Dellow.

As usual, our Ko-fi page is open for donations to help keep the podcast up and running: www.ko-fi.com/thethundermutters. Any contributions much appreciated.

We will return next month with March, our final episode from Clare’s Shepherd’s Calendar so please come back then and take a listen. 

All the tunes in this episode have been taken from John Clare's tune manuscript books, and Becky has used the transcriptions provided by Marion Ross in George Deacon's book John Clare and the Folk Tradition (Sinclair Browne Ltd., 1983) as the basis for her arrangements.

The tunes, whose histories are discussed in the show, are listed here for your convenience, in order of appearance: Lovly Nancy [sic], New Drops of Brandy, Female Drummer, The Muses, Irish Girl, Stringers Hornpipe, Charley over the water and Hornpipe.

The Thunder Mutters’ theme tune is The Gardengate

References:

Deacon, George, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London: Frances Boutle Publishers, 2002)

Kuntz, Andrew, and Valerio Pelliccioni, Traditional Tune Archive (2017) [Accessed 2nd January 2021]