The folk in us // Y werin ynom ni

Hedydd Ioan writes about the burgeoning rap and folk scenes in Wales, the idea of gwerin, and how tradition plays a role in how we express our identity

We are… it’s us man.
We are Welsh culture.

‘Who the Fuck is L E M F R E C K ?’, L E M F R E C K

Below y ddaear and in the cracks where only rhedyn dares to grow. Hidden inside the crevasses o’r mynyddoedd. Running freely through the dŵr that flows from rivers to pipes, from ein dyffrynoedd i’n dinasoedd. It seeps from our everyday life into something much bigger, much harder to articulate. The identity of an entire country is much too broad to grasp, the characteristics too general. How can we ever truly have a full picture of this rich tapestry of places, community and history that creates a national identity? One of the keys to start understanding a land, and its people, is to know its culture. 

The epigraph above, the opening lines of L E M F R E C K’s 2021 album The Pursuit, perfectly encapsulates the energy bursting at the seams of the Welsh rap scene, which has come into its own in the 2020s. Since the beginning of this new decade we’ve seen a whole host of new and exciting artists from Wales rapping about their personal heritage, experiences and history. From Sage Todz, Mace the Great and Luke RV coming into their own and dominating the rap scene in south Wales, to constant new acts starting and performing around the country like M. Yesekaon and Fruit. While the talent and artistry of this new wave is undeniable, what’s also interesting is the strong Welsh identity running through all of them. Gone are the days of having to conform to global uniformity when presenting yourself as an artist. We can trust an audience to understand the complexity of national identity and heritage while simultaneously being vocal and proud of our nationality – something that might not have been so easy to say on a mainstream level at the beginning of the last decade.

When thinking of Welsh identity it must be said: we are a nation born and developed out of tradition. Whether that is something that pushes us forward or holds us back is another conversation, but what’s undeniable is that it’s a part of our national and individual fabric. And traditionally, when looking at Welsh culture, we may have had the biggest insight into Welsh identity from cerddoriaeth gwerin. Folk music has deep roots in Wales and all Celtic nations. It is a widespread music style and genre that still persists today. But does it still reflect who we are as people and a country? 

As with many genres and labels we use nowadays, gwerin and folk have lost some of their meaning along the way. The same is true of pop music, which originally referred to literally music that was popular at that time, but has now become a label for a specific genre and a recognisable musical style. If we look at gwerin in its widest sense, gwerin is in fact two things. It firstly refers to the people, y werin. And then refers to the music – but more specifically music relating to the traditional culture of a community or nation. So when looking at gwerin in this sense then we find that folk actually breaks down into two things – the people and the culture.

As well as the rap scene in Wales developing and growing in recent years, we’ve also seen a resurgence in traditional folk music, especially with young audiences. Last year saw folk band Bwncath headline and drawing huge audiences for almost every big Welsh language music festival. Pulling an 11,000-strong crowd at Llwyfan y Maes, the main stage in the Eisteddfod, last year and over 10,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, Bwncath is one of the biggest bands in Welsh language music today. While folk music has always been a part of Welsh music’s DNA, it’s hard to think of another time that it’s been this popular. What was maybe more interesting than their set in the Eisteddfod was that at Maes B a couple of nights later.

Maes B is the Eisteddfod’s young music festival, specifically catering to the younger audience and a rite of passage for a lot of young Welsh teenagers; it is a completely different scene to the traditional Eisteddfod. This is why it was so interesting to see Bwncath – unashamedly themselves, unashamedly folk music – headlining the final night of Maes B to a sold out audience composed solely of young people shouting the words to all their songs. 

Bwncath’s music has obviously struck a chord with so many young Welsh people and has had a serious impact on Welsh language culture, bringing folk into the twenty-first century and keeping it relevant for younger audiences.

What does this have to do with the burgeoning rap scene I described earlier? I think what binds these phenomena together is this idea of gwerin, and how tradition plays a role in how we express our identity. 

Another brilliant folk musician who had a brilliant 2023 was Gareth Bonello, who performs under the name The Gentle Good. His album Galargan beautifully exemplifies the taking of traditional music and words and rerecording and recontextualising them in a modern way. Bonello used the collection of Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney at the National Library of Wales as a source for his project. Evans and Kinney were themselves curators, developers and platformers of excellent artists. Evans was a folk singer himself and also the head of light entertainment for BBC Wales between 1963 and 1973, which adds another layer of history and context to this beautiful project. 

Gwerin in its true sense is using our history, stories and art to express, articulate and explore who we are as individuals today. As humans we are never created in a vacuum. We are deeply complex and influenced by everything and anything, even things that have happened a hundred years before we were born. Gwerin is an idea for expressing this. You could almost see it not as a noun, a thing that has happened, but a verb, an action we use to interrogate our identity. To gwerin is to explore who we are. 

Rap and the Welsh rap scene specifically therefore definitely does gwerin, maybe even better than some traditional folk artists do in Wales. Rap as a genre was created out of self expression in poetry and as a form of social commentary too. Using older stories and exploring who you are is the heart of hip hop. 

A moment that perfectly encapsulated our modern gwerin for me was a gig I had the pleasure of attending last month in Clwb Ifor Bach down in Caerdydd. As a part of a rap night hosted by Beacons during their Welsh music conference Summit, Larynx Entertainment had a slot curating a live cypher. Larynx Entertainment has become a beacon of Welsh hip hop culture in recent years. Documenting, sharing and uplifting the artists, it truly is an organisation focused on the culture. Cyphers have had a big role in rap culture, particularly in battle rap circles, although it is a tradition less well remembered or preserved than freestyles, for instance.

Through Larynx’s wealth of knowledge and contacts, that night in Clwb Ifor Bach we got to see around six or seven up and coming artists freestyling on stage as the band for The Honest Poet jammed behind them. Over the course of half an hour the mic was passed around creating a flow of bars and tracks that never dipped in energy or quality from young artists Malika Blu, Eddie, AMARILVE and CH. What struck me most was how young and how fresh the talent was. These were young people who clearly had something to say and who could articulate it and show it in such a powerful way. Leaving Clwb Ifor that night it struck me how powerful music is as a way of preserving not only our culture but also our identity. Through this music we express the most intricate details of our mind, and therefore create a perfect lens through which we can view modern day identity.

In both of these examples – the affinity young people feel with modern day folk music, to the raw exploration and expression of Welsh rap – I find gwerin a useful idea for starting to understand true identity, from a scene to an entire country. National identity, national character, will always remain a mystery. To see the whole of it is perhaps never possible. The only thing we can do is look at the examples in practice, at how the people express themselves and take from that the stories, perspectives and values that we see. Gwerin might be the perfect place to start.

Hedydd Ioan is an artist from Dyffryn Nantlle in north Wales working in music, film and theatre. He runs the independent record label INOIS.

Glossary
y ddaear – the earth
rhedyn – fern
o’r mynyddoedd – of the mountains
dŵr – water
ein dyffrynoedd i’n dinasoedd – our valleys to our cities
gwerin/y werin – folk, the people