The Jolly Shepherd is Warlock warmed over. The musicologists are unanimous, Brian Collins, in Peter Warlock: The Composer (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996) remarked "...although Warlock's techniques are in evidence...they are produced with so little originality that the song is difficult to take seriously." In The Music of Peter Warlock: A Critical Survey (London: Dobson, 1979), Ian Copley "wonders whether it was this song that Constant Lambert had in mind when he wrote: 'Is it to be wondered at that having scored a deserved success with Good Ale he turned out a number of imitations of it for the sake of a handy cheque?'" While grinding economic disaster would not drive Warlock from Eynsford for another year, by 1927—the year of The Jolly Shepherd's composition—"cheques" for his songs were becoming far less "handy." While one may suspect Lambert of sarcasm, he is a genuine apologist, being more than a decade Warlock's junior and having fallen beneath the sway of his charisma about the time of The Jolly Shepherd, and a frequent weekend visitor to Eynsford to see the Warlock legend burgeoning at first hand. In March 1927, for instance, he and Lord Berners arrived together in a Rolls Royce to mingle with the bohemians and riffraff in their bibulous frolics. The Jolly Shepherd is strophic, running with little variation through four fulsome stanzas to accommodate an anonymous 17th century poem found in the 1661 collection Wit and Drollery, painting the shepherd's life, summer and winter, with "His bag full of cake bread, his bottle of ale-a, A cantle of cheese that is good and old-a... With his cloak and his sheep-hook thus marcheth he still-a, With a pair of fine bagpipes upon the green hill-a..." Picturesque and quaint, the song gives pleasure, though no one familiar with such other of Warlock's bucolic scenes (e.g., Milkmaids, or Hey, Troly Loly Lo) or a lusty, gusty incitement to belly cheer, as in Maltworms (composed with E.J. Moeran), can be quite satisfied with this. Looking over a chronological list of Warlock's works, with their returns to verse already set—as in Passing By and Youth—and the reworking of songs from years past (e.g., The Bailey Berith the Bell Away as a duet, Lullaby, and Mourn No Moe for women's voices) suggests desperation. Even The Passionate Shepherd, to Marlowe's familiar poem, falls short of inspiration, jogging on in the same fashion as The Jolly Shepherd without springing into Warlockian lift.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi