AUDIO: New Folk from The Old Folk

Songs from the Tin Tabernacl: A Roots Romance

Now we have a breakthrough into the public domain. Traces of my Welsh ancestors’ lives and journeys from the 1800’s were heard and welcomed as our Roots Romance suite of four work-in-progress Songs from the Tin Tabernacl reached their first live audience. They were premiered appropriately enough as part of Sheffield’s groundbreaking Migration Matters Festival programme earlier this year.

The programme also launched the video They Layed Me in a House of Sorrow: Martha's Song (Cân Martha), included a post-show Q&A session, and was billed as a performance of new research-based songwriting towards a forthcoming album & tour of Welsh-English contemporary folk music re-imagining stories from a 19th Century Welsh family’s musical bloodline that flowed from the ruins of Careg Iago on the stony farmlands of Ynys Môn, to the Carlton Welsh Salem Chapel, the long-demolished 'Tin Tabernacle' of a unique community of migrant Welsh coalminers at Wharncliffe Woodside colliery near Barnsley in South Yorkshire.

So I’m gathering together the new songs we have written so far and offering them more widely in anticipation of the next more expansive phase of the project, and perhaps also for personal reflection on how some deep engagement with the facts and the mysteries of our forebears… the intangible voices of our own heritages… can be shaped and shared so as to take their place as resonant new folklore through music of the here and now.

Songs from the Tin Tabernacle : a Roots Romance

1. Cist Gobaith (Hope Chest)

1. This battered old pine chest for now rests with me, and has travelled with generations of my Welsh family since before 1872. It holds much of the accumulated family correspondence, photographs and publications that I drew on to prompt the making of these songs.

2. They Layed Me in a House of Sorrow - Martha’s Song (Cân Martha)

2. An imagined voice of my musical great grandmother Martha Jones, whose own mother Elinor was born on the Welsh mainland but married & went to live at first in Rhyddlan Bach on Ynys Môn, leaving the mountains of Eifionydd behind.

3. No Clogs in t‘ Chapel

3. My great great-grandfather was Richard Francis, Master Clogmaker of Caernarfon, and this is the voice of his son Benjamin who married Martha Jones of Ynys Môn before migrating to South Yorkshire, to become the first pastor of the Salem Eglwys Cymraeg Carlton, our Tin Tabernacl..

4. Molawd Tref Caernarfon - In Praise of Caernarfon Town

4. Rev Benjamin Menai Francis my great-grandfather was born in Caernarfon and became a printer, poet and fiery preacher. Though he lived, worked and raised his family in C19th industrial Lancashire & Yorkshire, he remained at heart an outsider amongst the English, and this song rekindles his deep nostalgia for his homeland.

All songs feature musicians-songwriters Cerys Hafana (Welsh triple harp, vocals), Bryony Griffith (fiddle, vocals) & Tony Francis Bowring (bass, production) with Cath Carr (steelpans) and Kadialy Kouyate (kora)