Songs from the Tin Tabernacle
a Roots Romance
Making bilingual future-folk songs from re-imagined stories & places of my Welsh ancestors
‘History is another country, they do things differently there’ Doreen Lawrence
This is the first post of my new Substack blog, so here’s some background…
A recent award from Arts Council England is supporting me to lay the foundations for some hopefully significant new contemporary British folk music. I’m a Sheffield-based world music bassist & producer (formerly of Batanai Marimba, Rafiki Jazz, Konimusic) and this project Songs from the Tin Tabernacle: A Roots Romance digs into my inherited Welsh musical roots & diverse DNA.
For the last few months I’ve spent many wintry days deeply immersed in historical public records, archived documents & the packed contents of an inherited C19th family hope chest, but now I’m getting to know some of the old folk, I can sense their voices and see a landscape of biography, romance & anecdote unfolding from these legacies of my musical Welsh forebears. I’m already imagining some thrilling transformations into potential new song narratives, ultimately to be arranged and recorded in a suite of vibrant future-folk music.
Songs from the Tin Tabernacle is taking me to some of the places, people & events from the cultural, religious & landscape history of the times. I’m unearthing compelling fragments of narrative around my unknown great-grandfather Benjamin Menai Francis and his C19th siblings, peers, parents and beloveds, and I’m witnessing his family migration from their roots in the peace & poverty of a rural Ynys Môn (Anglesey) tenement farm to Yorkshire, for him to amazingly appear as the founding non-conformist pastor of this project’s emblematic Tin Tabernacle, aka the corrugated iron-built Welsh Salem Chapel (pictured) of Carlton village’s Wharncliffe Woodside colliery near Barnsley.
Momentarily we’re outside this little Wesleyan chapel in the heart of a South Yorkshire rural landscape torn by that era’s relentless coalfield expansion. It’s fabricated in Sheffield, like countless others during the late nineteenth century, and built for a unique community of migrant North Wales coalminers & their families. We can slip through the porch door of this long-demolished Iron Church, maybe take a seat, and catch the faint echoes of the sounds of the Bards, those Celtic praisemakers, to be boldly re-awakened as we go forward in vibrant new storytelling & song.
I’m lucky to have such a gifted and empathetic creative team around me to help realize this narrative together. The research phase has been decidedly solitary, so now its positively energising to step forward into the hustle of prep for creative collaboration as we edge towards the public domain. Entrusted with a dropbox-full of selected archive material to inspire the crafting of new lyrics in both Welsh & Yorkshire-dialect English for the first cluster of songs, are Welsh triple-harpist & singer Cerys Hafana (Machynllech) and Yorkshire singer & fiddle-player Bryony Griffith (Kirklees). In April they’ll be joined in the studio as we develop and live-record the musical arrangements, by Senegalese kora-player Kadialy Kouyate (London), steelpannist Cath Carr (Sheffield), and myself Tony Francis Bowring on bass guitar (also Sheffield). Tracking the whole process is Frontier Media filmmaker João Paulo Simoes as he gathers footage towards the June release of a Songs from the Tin Tabernacle doc-video.
Coming up next: my next few posts will share some of the tangled lines of discovery that will lead to a set of songwriting scenarios…
