“Life In Song” #14: “January And The Summer Folks” was inspired by a blizzard we had that kept us home bound for a few days. The first part of the song is descriptive of what I was seeing out my window in the snowstorm. Then the second part is remembering summer as in a day dream…then we come back to the reality of Winter but with the hopeful observation that Spring will eventually come… I recorded two version of this, one that uses a pick and strumming and the other which uses a softer finger picking style. Let me know which one you prefer! If I find any older recordings of this song they will be in the Back Stage Pass Members area as bonuses.
PLEASE! Use headphones or decent speakers to listen to this instead of your tinny little computer speakers. It’s recorded in crystal clear digital sound and the headphones really make a difference!
Video:
Audio:
Strum Version –
Finger Picking Version –
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Lyrics:
January and the Summer Folks | Song #14 | January 1978
January comes to my town once a year
Visits for a while and then
kicks on out of here
Leaving ice on the telephone wires
And a blanket of snow on the dormant backyard sapphires
Of the swimming pools…
The summer jewels
The streetlights through my window
Look like ghosts veiled in snow
Haunting the cars that struggle through
The drifts of the road below
And the wind sounds like an interstate
It threatens to take my home away
And a friend or relative, asks me to play
A summer song
A “right where they belong song”
So I create…
Kids playing tag outside the screen door
They laugh a little now and they laugh a little more
The grass is green in the yard and
There’s plenty to eat from the garden
Sing a summer song for the summer folks
Sit into the night on the porch telling jokes
Sing a summer song for the summer folks
Sit into the night on the porch telling jokes
Watching the moon and the stars for hours
Or sitting inside during thunder showers
Singing of blue skies and ice cream cones
Bare feet on sun warmed stones
Sing a summer song for the summer folks
Sit into the night on the porch telling jokes
Sing a summer song for the summer folks
Sit into the night on the porch telling jokes
But no matter what song you sing
You must have patience in the end
Cause sooner or later Spring will push
Winter round the bend…
January comes to my town once a year…
Tuning DADGAD
“January And The Summer Folks” by Mark Shepard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
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