Welsh musician Gareth Bonello on the need to preserve folk music

I’ve always loved music and learned to play a variety of instruments from a young age including guitar, cello and piano. I taught myself to play the acoustic guitar and became fascinated by the picking style of folk musicians from the USA and the UK. Growing up, I wasn’t aware of many Welsh players so I decided to search for Welsh folk songs in the archives of museums and libraries and performed them in my home town, Cardiff. These songs are a beautiful part of our cultural heritage and I wanted to share them with my peers.

As a musician and songwriter, I have performed Welsh folk songs and songs in the Welsh language all over the world. From the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC to the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, to the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh and the deserts of Rajasthan. As well as performing my music all over the world, I have been collaborating with musicians from different cultures for a long time. In 2013 I released an album called ‘Y Bardd Anfarwol’ (The Immortal Bard), which was a collaboration with Chinese Folk musicians from the Chengdu Associated Theatre of Performing Arts. More recently I have been working with indigenous Khasi artists from Meghalaya to create and record music based on Khasi and Welsh folk traditions.

We formed the Khasi-Cymru Collective and released an album in 2021 titled 'Sai-thaiñ ki Sur (The Weaving of Voices)’, which was very well recieved beyond Wales and Meghalaya. I’m currently in Shillong recording our follow up album, which I’m very excited about. The melodies and poetry of the folk tradition are hugely inspirational to me and the music I write is coloured by their influence. Expressing myself in Welsh is as natural as breathing and I believe that if the language is to survive we must not be shy about creating and expressing ourselves in our native tongue.

Welsh folk music is intricate and varied, both in terms of musical style and instrumentation. The Harp is a key instrument in Wales and the earliest surviving notation for that instrument,known as the Robert Ap Huw Manuscriptcontains tunes that date from between 1340-1500. This music is a key source of cerdd dant (string poetry), a form of poetry used by the early Welsh bards to sing the praises of medieval princes and princesses. Cerdd dant is still practiced by many harpists today and poetry is still enormously important in Welsh culture. The best poets use a sophisticated system of rhyme and alitteration known as cynghannedd and even todaythe highest honour in Welsh arts isarguably to win ‘YGadair’ (The Chair) for the composition of cynghannedd at an anuual festival called the National Eisteddfod. The triple harp, a large instrument with three rows of parallel strings rather than the usual one, is an instrument that is particularly associated with Welsh folk music. For examples of Welsh harp traditions I can recommedRobin Huw Bowen, Nansi Richards, Llio Rhydderch and Gwennan Gibbard. For a new take on the tradition check out and the young harpist Cerys Hafana.

Many songs that form the Welsh folk tradition are not high poetry written for the pleasure of kings, but rather simple rhymes written by ordinary people. These are the ballads of the 18th and 19th centuries and they form a large part of my own repertoire. Many are known as Hen Benillion (Old Verses), anonymous verses written by common folk about love, loss, the land and nature, life and death. These would have been sung a capella, or to the accompaniment of harp and fiddle in taverns and barns and gatherings throughout the country.

A folk tradition that is particularly relevant at this time of year is the Mari Lwyd (Grey Mare), which is the skull of a horse mounted on a pole draped in a white sheet. A person hides under the sheet carrying the pole and a group travel around houses and taverns singing traditional songs and demanding payment from those inside. To enjoy the magic of excellent ballad singing, one should listen to Juie Murphy & Dylan Fowler, Fernhill, Gwilym Bowen Rhys, Cynefin, Georgia Ruth and Siân James.

The Crwth is another stringed instrument that resembles an early Violin or Fiddle. It is thought to have been present in Wales since Roman times and is played with a bow. By todayit has largely been replaced by the fiddle but is still in use by musicians such as Bob Evans from the band Bragod and folk musician Cass Meurig.  There is a large repertoire of tunes for the Welsh fiddle, with quite a bit of crossover with traditions in Ireland, Scotland, England, Cornwall and Brittany (Northen France).

The nonconformist religious revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries meant that many Welsh tunes were lost, as people abandoned the instrument because of its association with dancing and drinking. It is thought that the tradition only survived at all because they were retained in the Gypsy community, There has been a revival in the 20th and 21st centuries however, and there are many fine young players making the instrument their own. 

a Welsh tradition of bagpipes too, known as Pibau, and a Pibgorn (Hornpipe), which is a single reed instrument cut from the Elder tree and amplified by a cow’s horn. For percussion the Irish bodhrán, a type of frame drum made with a goatskin has become increasingly popular with Welsh folk musicians. For music incorporating fiddles and pipes I’d recommend bands like Calan, Vri, Ar Log, Crasdant and Carreg Lafar and soloists Ceri Rhys Matthews, Patrick Rimes, Angharad Jenkins and Aneirin Jones.

Very simply, it’s a rough translation of my real name; Gareth Bonello. The meaning of ‘Gareth’ is ‘Gentle’ and I took the ‘Bon’ from my Maltese surname to mean ‘Good’ (as in the French “Bon Appetit!”).

I also like the way it echoes one of the most famous lines from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas;

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Regardless of genre, I think what audiences want is to be entertained. That doesn’t have to mean a big laser show with pyrotechnics, it just means finding a way to connect.Most of the shows I play are to small audiences in intimate spaces and what I try to do is help the audience relate to the story and message of the song. Folk songs are about being human, they are about life and death and modern audiences can relate to them just as well as people did in the past. Folk music will often tell us a little bit more about where we came from, who we are and where we’re heading. It doesn’t always have to be serious and stuffy but it also doesn’t need to a huge laser show with pyrotechnics. From my own point of view, there’s a stark beauty in the simplicity of many folk songs that can transport the audience from their everyday lives. People’s way of consuming music has completely changed in the last decade and who knows how things will change in the next ten years? But with more people than ever gaining easier access to the entire history of recorded music I can’t believe there isn’t a place for folk music somewhere.

We need to treasure and support the holders of tradition and encourage people to learn about their heritage from them. I love hearing folk music in it’s simplest form delivered with traditional instruments, there’s something raw and magical in that. I also love new interpretations of tradition, re-imagining of themes and the inclusion of non-traditional instruments and see no reason why we can’t have both. Schools, colleges and universities that teach folk music spread the tradition to youths that would not have discovered it and that can have a profound effect. I’ve seen it in Shillong, where students from all over India are learning about the folk traditions of the Northeast. Innovation and experimentation can bring in new audiences, we should be open to new ideas and encourage the younger generation to discover folk forms and interpret them in their own way.