Token,

You wrote,

'I seem to pick up some important cultural vibe regarding singing. What's the deal with that? Am I tripping or is there something about the Welsh and singing.'

The Welsh have always been a race along the bardic tradition.

In the sense that singing and music has always been important to them, but not just the Welsh obviously, but the Irish and Scots too.

I remember a few years back taking a weekend trip to Dublin just for the craic.

A friend and I went to this pub on a Sunday lunchtime, the Copper arms I think iot was called, there'd been a pub there since around the 11the century.

We squeezed into a little back room and supped our pints, a four piece fiddle and guitar combo were playing for their guiness and all was well with the world.

Occasionally, someone would get up and sing a song, a humorous ditty or something a little more traditional before the blazing hearth, while outside the harsh winter howled forgotten.

And then a small little lady, demurely dressed, got up to sing.

I'd never hear the song before Token, but oh her voice.

It was a traditional lament about lost love, gone to the fighting and all that, but I swear, from the first moment she sang the first note, the entire pub just crashed to a halt.

Men in their Sunday bests squeezed awkwardly into the already crushed room, straining their necks to here this angel sing.

She sang with her eyes closed, spitting her passion out as she trembled and shook with ancient feeling.

Singing's the wrong word, that day she spun a spell of folk-craft that ensnared every man jack of us in blinking wonder.

For a full five minutes no-one coughed, shifted, sneezed or drank while she told her tale that had to be heard, and listen we gladly did with glasses frozen half-way to our lips.

And then, suddenly she was finished.

She got up and returned to her seat at the bar as though nothing had taken place.

For a good minute after that the whole pub remained silent, for we were all thinking the same thing, that our hearts would burst and we, grown men, would weep with sad joy at what we had just heard.

Then slowly, the spell fading, the low hub-bub of conversation renewed, but hushed and strangely muted in the smoke filled air.

Eventually a merry jig was struck up by the fiddler, and the pub within minutes was back to it's cheery rumbunctious self.

But there wasn't a soul there that afternoon who's heart had not been marked for life, who's memory of that moment would never fade for as long as they could breathe.

That such a small lass could bring such tall strong men to their knees with the power in her voice.

I made time to talk to her later, she was a simple nurse.

I asked her why she didn't take the time to record her song, and she laughed lightly at me, saying that it was too much fuss and besides she had a real job to do now didn't she?

The Celts are only slightly sundered, despite the depravations under the heel of the English of yore.

The Welsh too have always made time for song.

The English once tried to murder our language, to all intents and purposes it was banned by the English lords.

It survived, barely, through the 'chapel'.

Predominately methodist churches would conduct masses in Welsh, the hymns and psalms would be in Welsh, religeous lessons were in Welsh.

The chapel provided the glue that allowed Welsh to survive and eventually flourish through the male voice choir.

Because of the Welsh joy of song and music, young men flocked to the chapel to sing the hymns and soaring areas, that became famous the world over.

Later, the language would revive and is now flourishing.

The Welsh adopted rugby as their national sport, and bloodied the noses of the English with satisfying regularity. They loved being able to sing bawdy songs and hymns that the English could not understand, it became the symbol of the Welsh struggle for freedom.

Men would march to and from work singing, and there was a piano or an organ in nearly every respectable home.

It's all changed now of course.

But three years ago, some friends and I went to Rome for the rugby.

There. we commandeered a pub, and within minutes someone had struck up a song.

Aled from Trimsamram, sitting next to me had a fine tenor, and soon we were all belting out Cwm Rhonddda, and Myfanwy among others.

Italian passer by's stopped in astonishment as the singing spilled onto the Palm Sunday streets and a crowd gathered to listen to the Welsh in full throat.

Later that drunken nigght, beneath the Pantheon, we sang softer but with no less passion, and Rome marvelled, for this was the first time that Wales had played rugby in Rome, and they were astounded at the song reverberating arounf the piazza and up into the heavens beneath a sky crowned with a glory of flickering stars.

yechydda,