Well, I had a thought… Why not ask forum members which are their favourite Welsh tunes, seeing as it’s St David’s Day a week today. If you don’t know any Welsh tunes, maybe you can pick one or two up here
To kick off, here’s one: Breuddwyd y Wrach (The Witch’s Dream) aka Gyrru’r Byd o’m Blaen (Driving the World Before Me)
Thanks, Geraint. You inspired me to look up St. David’s Day. I wasn’t familiar with it. I have fairly deep Welsh roots, mostly Joneses, but not much knowledge of Welsh culture.
I think the only Welsh tune that I know is an air I learned from a video jemtheflute put on youtube, of Lliw Lili Ymysg y Drain, or The Colour of the Lily Amongst the Thorns. Very nice…
Nice idea, Geraint. Also nice choice, Simon - that’s one of my favourite Welsh waltzes - goes very nicely with Glwysen by Edward Jones (to whom we were referring in that recent mega-thread!) next to which it appears in Blodau’r Grug - one of the main readily available in-print source books of Welsh tunes. Here are the dots for the pair of them:
The “thorn” referred to in the title Blodau’r Drain could be either Blackthorn (sloe - prunus spinosa, draenen ddu) the snow-white flowers of which are an early spring adornment of our British hedges, flowering before most of the leaves get started; or it could be Hawthorn (May/whitethorn - crataegus monogyna, draenen wen) which flowers (surprisingly enough!) in May and turns the hedges to rolls of creamy cotton-wool with a heady scent… Both are very common deliberately planted hedgerow species (because of their growth habits and thorniness) as well as occurring wild.
Here are the dots for two more “Dream” tunes - Breuddwyd Dafydd Rhys I think is even lovelier than Simon’s suggestion, and is far less well known. I suggest playing it as an air rather than as a waltz - not too slow, but without the waltz swinging rhythm:
And: - the first of these two rather brisker (non-waltz although 3/4) tunes (learnt from Ceri Rhys Matthews who says they’re kind-of galliards) the second of which is better known in another slower, waltz-like version (which I don’t have dots for at present):
Geraint posted the ABC for Breuddwyd y Wrach above - here are the dots, prefaced by those for another slip-jig, Hoffedd ap Hywel - the two tunes are commonly played for the energetic dance also entitled “Hoffedd ap Hywel”.
Yes, they are most commonly played in those keys, though you do sometimes find folk playing them up a tone to make 'em easier for (C whistle-less) whistle and box players.
Since it was mentioned, here also are the dots for Lliw Lili Ymysg y Drain (lots of dreams and thorns here this-morning!)
Just a quick mention of some rough points of Welsh orthography and pronunciation for the uninitiated: “dd” is a soft, voiced “th” sound; a single “f” is = to an English “v”; a double “ff” = English “f”; “y” in “ymysg” is kinda like English “u” - “um-usg”; best (not brilliant!) approximation I can give for “breuddwyd” (“dream”) is “breythe-oid” (though in N. Wales they’d make the “wy” less of a dipthong, “breythe-oo-id”) - the “wy” in “Glwysen” is similar; “drain” and “draenen” (its plural) don’t sound like English “drain” as in (“down the…”) - the dipthong vowel sound is more like English “eye”; the “au” dipthong in “blodau” is also similar to “eye”; the “u” in “grug” is like an English “y” - the word is pronounced similarly to the name of the Norwegian composer Grieg.
I don’t know the Welsh titles, but two tunes well known in the United States are The Ash Grove and All Through the Night. Another known by the New England contradance crowd is Sweet Jenny Jones.
I’ve heard English words put to them, but I’d love to hear them in their original Welsh (perhaps with accurate translations).
OK, here are the dots for Ar Hyd Y Nos (All Through the Night) together with a well known jig, Y Derwydd (The Druid) and aslo for Llwyn Onn (The Ash Grove)
As you say, these are incredibly well known well beyond Wales. I’m sure you’d find sets of the lyrics and translations online and probably YouTube performances in Welsh if you search for them - try searching on the Welsh titles for better results!
A swift Google on “Sweet Jenny Jones” (I didn’t know that title) brought up a decent entry on The Session (!!! !!!) - it seems this is the tune best/more properly known as Cadair Idris (One of Wales’s three most famous mountains) - y’know, the one that makes everyone think of How Much is that Doggie in the Window.
I thought I was baulking at spelling it “Cadair Idris”. I spell it “Cader Idris”, but it appears that you can spell it either way … hmmm …
Anyway, too lazy to give anyone the dots, but my fave is Ty Coch Y Gaerdydd, in F. Great one if you have a session with a lot of keyless flute players.
“Cader” is the old-fashioned anglicised but very common spelling, “Cadair” the orthodox Welsh spelling that nowadays one would expect to see.
You, lazy . Again???
Ty Coch Caerdydd is most commonly played in G these days, of course! Not that F bothers me - have keys, can cope . I think you’re looking for that worm-can again, though, seeing as what that tune is also known as “A Welsh Maggot”!
Ah, great. This is sorta what I was after! Hope you learn some good tunes
I almost put “Blodau’r Drain” up - played it at a session last week and remembered how lovely it is. However, I went for ‘Breuddwyd y Wrach’ which, I must confess, I transposed into D for the benefit of C’less whistlers…
Jem - I’m very fond of ‘Y Pural Fesur’ but colleagues at my local session in Swansea reckon it’s boring. Phillistines, they are.
So. Another tune or two from me. Two, actually, and they’re both pipe-friendly. Incidentally I shall continue to post in abc but in case anyone’s unaware, the abc can be pasted into the wonderful ABC Convert-o-Matic Tune-O-Tron on concertina.net, and you’ll magically get the dots and it’ll play midi. Hence my preference for the abc 's. I’ll no doubt playing playing these two tomorrow in Merthyr, in case anyones’s around! Dic y Cymro is a good tune, especially on pipes. Pwt ar y Bys is very similar to ‘Buttered Peas’ and is pretty much ubiquitous in sessions all over Wales.
Some Meirionydd people of my acquaintance continue to spell it 'Cader’Idris, I suspect because it reflects local pronunication, although the standard is indeed ‘Cadair’. The local High School is still ‘Ysgol y Gader’. Linguistic fossilisation, I expect.
It is said that someone who spends the night on the mountain wakes up either a madman or a poet. I was told that old Idris the Giant would sit on the mountain to look at the night sky, and he was famous for his knowledge of the stars. Dunno whether he knew Jenny Jones, though. I had a surprise listening to aMellstock Band (I believe) CD, when ‘Sweet Jenny Jones’ was rather familiar.
Oddly enough, I’ve never heard Ty^ Coch Caerdydd’ played in anything other than G
Could you explain that word “either” in the context, please?
Ty Coch … well, I daresay it’s played in G now, my lad. But when I were a boy, skipping gaily through the mountains of South Wales … Now, just you pull up that stool there lad … and fetch me another …
A pint? Certainly. Come see me on the 29th of February, I’ll sort you out…
As to the poet/madman thing, I didn’t like to say, there may be a few people with a tendency to poesy lurking on the board, one never knows…
Through which mountains did you gaily skip? I am ever eager to learn. Did they have great clumps of windswept harpers clustered on the hilltops putting the boot in if you played Ty Coch Caerdydd in anything other than F?
I’ll come back to things maggotty when I’ve time tomorrow - off to a sesh now! Just to irritate, the sources I’ve looked at have it in two flats and/or three sharps…
I’ll have you know it was proper Welsh back then - I even went to a Welsh sounding school. Of course, nobody actually spoke any there, which is why I lost my Welsh language (I could speak it when we arrived in Cwmbran, but it had gone by the time we left - sheesh!). They were all too Welsh to actually speak it. (Don’t laugh - that’s how it used to be in certain places back then.) I next heard much Welsh spoken in that year that I was in Brumagem. (That’s Birmingham, for those not of these shores.)
When I was little I thought ‘Brum’ was the Welsh for Birmingham. One of my father’s best friends used to teach there, and I gather he Wasn’t Alone. Didn’t they used to have a Birmingham Welsh Choir, and Rugby Club?
They certainly did, Geraint. They also had a very thriving Welsh Club, which used to meet twice a week for a sing song down at the Gun Barrels on the Bristol Road. I used to live for those nights. Fantastic. Do you know, I haven’t experienced the sort of singing you used to get spontaneously in Welsh pubs (and in that one in Brum) since I was a teenager. There would be the occasional outbreak when the Valleys boys came up to Cardiff, but nothing like we used to have all the time when I was a kid. And it was so musical - 4-part singing, everybody in tune, gorgeous tone ‘n’ everything.
People probably think I’m exaggerating …
… just remembered - I do recall one other time when there was that sort of quality of singing. It was during the notorious Miners Rally in Mansfield in 1984. Unfortunately, they were singing something unworthy in the direction of some young women who were leaning out of their windows watching the marchers, and the march stewards stopped it. Quite right too. Mind, it was lovely harmony …
!!!) - it seems this is the tune best/more properly known as 
. I think you’re looking for that worm-can again, though, seeing as what that tune is also known as “A Welsh Maggot”!
