I'm Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover

Lyrics: Mort Dixon
Music: Harry M Woods

This was sung by Robert Hunter on 1 May 1997 as part of a medley following his playing of That Lucky Old Sun

He started by saying:

"That song was in the Top 10 back in 1949 when I lived in Bothell. There were a lot of good songs that year. There was that ...

Way down in Copper Canyon where there ain't nothing else to do."

That's a fragment from the song "Copper Canyon" released in 1949 by Lisa Kirk. Hunter continued:

"And then there was:

I'm looking over a four leaf clover that I overlooked before
One leaf is sunshine, the second is rain, third for the roses that bloom in the lane
No need explaining, the one remaining Is somebody I adore
I'm looking over a four-leaf clover that I overlooked before

That was in fact written in 1927 but then popularised by Art Mooney in 1948. Hunter continued:

"And then there was that lovely:

How are things in Glocca Morra
Is that little brook still babbling there?
Does it still run down to Johny's cove
Singing as it goes

"That was a nice one. That was a sad one. That one used to make me cry.It was the circumstances during which that song was popular that made me cry, not the song itself."

That song is an extract from "How Are Things In Glocca Morra?", published in 1946 and introduced in the 1947 musical "Finian's Rainbow".

Hunter continued with playing around with his Echoplex control, interspersed with a verse from Wayfaring Stranger and segueing into Sugaree.

The "circumstances that made me cry" may relate to the fact that his father abandoned his mother and him and he stayed with foster families for two years in 1948-1949ish before his mother married Norman Hunter. Two extracts from his journals:

2 July 1997: "When I was a kid we had a car chasing dog. Mother often said "I wonder what she'd do with it if she caught one?" ... The car chaser was a Belgian Shepherd I got when I was eight, living in Bothell outside Seattle. The family broke up at that time and she was given away. Huge ripoff. She was just going to stay with friends for awhile, right? I knew better."

20 April 2002: I went to second grade in [Seattle], or near enough, Bothell it was, now home of Microsoft but a rural one gas station and feedstore kinda place back in 1949. ... Tried to do the third grade in a one room school house in Bear Prairie Washington, but I didn't fit so they didn't let me come back after the first day. Did a couple more days of the third grade in Vanport, the year of the big flood that wrecked the town in '49. Wake of the flood, laughing water, back on the road with another few weeks of school under my belt. I could read a cereal box by this time.