The Thunder Mutters

Written by: Becky Dellow/Adam Horovitz
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  • Summary

  • The Thunder Mutters is a podcast in love with music, and with the music of words. Presented fortnightly by poet Adam Horovitz and fiddle player Becky Dellow, it takes its name from the poem by John Clare. We will be exploring the connections between music and poetry, concentrating for the first year of the podcast on Clare’s 'The Shepherd’s Calendar' and on the tunes Clare gathered. Every month, we will bring you the appropriate section of the Calendar interspersed with relevant tunes that Clare himself collected and likely played. We will be discussing the provenance of the tunes and leavening the academic with a healthy dose of poetry and music in performance. In the weeks in between, we will present shorter shows exploring the works of the Romantic poets and others from the 18th and 19th centuries, again always interweaving tunes that the poets themselves might have heard or played amongst the poems and conversation. Having said that we will be presenting poets and tunes from the 18th and 19th centuries, it is very much our intention to also invite living poets and musicians to respond to the work of the poems and tunes we present. We believe that music and poetry are perhaps the best ways of holding an on-going conversation with our ancestors and our descendants, and are keen to find ways of furthering that conversation through The Thunder Mutters. We hope that you enjoy this podcast. If you do, we hope you might be inspired to subscribe and contribute to our Patreon in some small way, to help mitigate the costs of producing the show, (https://patreon.com/thethundermutters) and that you will consider following us on Facebook (fb.me/thethundermutters) and/or Twitter (https://twitter.com/ThunderMutters) If you enjoy the shows, we’d love to hear from you. Becky Dellow is an experienced and versatile fiddle player who fuses fiddle traditions from around the British Isles. “The tradition of fiddle playing in my family goes back at least five generations,” says Becky, “to my great great grandfather Thomas Hampton, a fiddle player from Hereford. It was his hand-written tune manuscript book that inspired my PhD research under the supervision of trad singer and academic, Dr Fay Hield.” Since completing her PhD, Dr. Dellow has continued to carry out tune research, contributing to academic journals and conferences, and uses the research to develop her performance as a folk musician. Adam Horovitz is a poet, editor and performer. His first collection of poetry, Turning, was published in 2011 and his most recent book, The Soil Never Sleeps, explores the farmlands of Britain 200 years on from Clare, who was a strong influence on the book. He has collaborated numerous times with musicians, and has presented two shows with Becky. The first was for the Laurie Lee centenary. “I asked Becky because Laurie was a fiddle player as well as a poet,” he says, “not knowing at the time that her grandfather, Charles Hampton played in a band with Laurie in the late 1920s. It was perfect synchronicity, and that surprise has led to The Thunder Mutters.”
    Copyright 2023 Becky Dellow/Adam Horovitz
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Arts & Entertainment Entertainment & Performing Arts Music
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Episodes
  • Episode Eighteen - Valentine Special

    Episode Eighteen - Valentine Special
    Feb 9 2022

    Welcome to the eighteenth episode of The Thunder Mutters, our Valentine special, giving you a taster of projects we have been involved in since the last podcast series.

    This episode features extracts of poetry from 'Love & Other Fairy Tales', written and performed by Adam Horovitz, and traditional tunes from Becky's album, 'Take Her Out and Air Her' arranged and performed by Becky Dellow on fiddles and piano, with accompaniment by Lukas Drinkwater and vocals Milly 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.

    Becky's album can be bought from this link: https://beckydellow.bandcamp.com

    and for Adam's book, follow this link: http://adamhorovitz.co.uk/blog/shop/love-other-fairy-tales/

    The order of play is listed below:

    Tune: Garden of Butterflies

    Poem: Some Kind of Fairy Tale

    Poem: There's a Music

    Tune: Rolling Wave

    Poem: Seed & Stone

    Poem: A Rose By Any Other Name

    Song: False, False        

    Poem: The Marriage of Consonant and Vowel

    Poem: Fragment of a Fairy Tale

    Tune: My Mind Will Never Be Easy

    Poem: Love Poem Disguised

    Poem: Stopping with a bicycle on a hill above Stroud

    Ruskin Mill

    The Thunder Mutters’ theme tune is The Gardengate
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    42 mins
  • Episode Seventeen - The Shepherd's Calendar - March - John Clare

    Episode Seventeen - The Shepherd's Calendar - March - John Clare
    Mar 26 2021

    Welcome to the seventeenth episode of The Thunder Mutters, featuring 'March' 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.

    This is our final episode featuring Clare’s ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ and we will be having a month off in April, ready to return in May with a new project.

    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: St David’s Day, Way To Get Married, Kingsbridge Assembly, Capt Mackintosh, Coming Through The Rye, Archers Dance, Montrose Reel and The Irish Roodalum.

    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]
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    32 mins
  • Episode Sixteen - The Shepherd's Calendar - February - John Clare

    Episode Sixteen - The Shepherd's Calendar - February - John Clare
    Feb 26 2021

    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]
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    24 mins

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