Welcome to the eleventh episode of The Thunder Mutters, featuring 'October' 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 extremely shortly in November with the next episode, 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's 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: Daniel’s Hornpipe, Betty Brown, A Hunting We Will Go, Mother Goose, White Cockade, Kempshot Hunt and George II. In addition to Clare’s poem, this episode also features a song by Giles Watson and Simone Keane called ‘The Singing Tree’ and ‘John Clare’s Rules’ a poem by Brian Johnstone.

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 29th October 2020]