#TradSongTues 29th January - Number Songs

This is a series of posts about the #TradSongTues project, run by various people at the University of Sheffield. Every week I've been recording a song for the theme, sharing it and talking about it. Come and play on Twitter!

I had a couple of options that I thought about over the weekend, but then promptly forgot them when I remembered that this song exists. The Lancashire Shepherd:

I originally learned this from the singing of The Watersons, who are one of the first bands that I listened to in my folk listening career. I think I stole a lot of their material because it was all so good1!

This uses the "Yan Tan Tethera" counting system, which is a traditional counting rhyme from Northern England2. Most people seem to agree that it's no longer in active use for counting sheep, but likely lives on in a few playground rhymes.

  1. I've got memories of recording this as a bonus track for Himself, but I'm not 100% sure where that actually went. ↩︎

  2. The fact this is called the Lincolnshire Shepherd is also a slight hint as to where this was used. ↩︎