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The ploughboy-poet John Clare recorded an entire musical culture - the songs and tunes he heard around him in the early 19th century countryside.

Everybody sang all the time - the milkmaids, the agricultural labourers, men in the pub at night - and John Clare wrote down and collected their songs. Some were sentimental, some bawdy, some nonsensical. His collection, written out on tiny scraps of paper, has become our only record of a rich musical culture which has now disappeared as noisy machinery and the rise of music halls put paid to that singing.

The songs Clare knew were also the key to his phenomenal success â€" they were how he managed to transform himself from a ploughboy to a poet. Ballad-writing was his apprenticeship.

Clare's status has risen recently, so that he is now regarded by many as England's finest nature poet. But his songs are still almost unknown.

In this programme, musician David Owen Norris unearths Clare's music from the Northamptonshire Archives and sets it for singers Gwyneth Herbert and Thomas Guthrie to perform. He then plays it on location in Clare's cottage in the village of Helpstun to three Clare experts - poet Paul Farley who has edited an edition of Clare, scholar Sara Lodge and folksong expert Derek Scott. We hear a haunting song of abandonment which Clare's mother taught him, a smutty song The Cuckoo's Nest ("give me a girl with a wriggle and a twist"), a song of Clare's which became a hit on the West End stage, and a haunting song which Clare wrote at the end of his life in the Northamptonshire Asylum.

David Owen Norris is a pianist and composer and Professor of Music at Southampton University.

Producer: Elizabeth Burke.
A Loftus production for Â鶹Éç Radio 4.