Beyond borders: the female Welsh pop voice

Hill, Sarah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6738-8818 2006. Beyond borders: the female Welsh pop voice. Radical Musicology 1 (17 May)

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Abstract

For all its reputation as a musical culture, the number of women pop stars to have emerged from Wales can be counted charitably on two hands, with some fingers to spare. Wales is a small country, host to two rich linguistic cultures, each with its own musical heritage and traditions, yet very few musicians of either gender have crossed over from one tradition to the other. The rarity of a female singer making such a border crossing is marked, allowing for a delicate lineage to be traced across the decades, from the 1960s to the present, revealing certain commonalities of experience, acceptance, and reversion. With this in mind, I would like to draw a linguistic and cultural connection between two determinedly different Welsh women singers. In the 1960s, when women's voices were the mainstays of Motown, the folk circuit and the Haight-Ashbury, in Wales only Mary Hopkin managed to shift from Welsh-language to Anglo-American pop; thirty years later, Cerys Matthews made the same journey. These two women bear certain similarities: they both come from South Wales, they are both singers whose first, or preferred, language is Welsh, and they both found their niche in the Anglo-American mainstream market. These two women faced the larger cultural problems of linguistic and musical border-crossings, but more importantly, they challenged the place of the female pop voice in Wales, and of the female Welsh pop voice in Anglo-America.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Music
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Publisher:	radical-musicology.org.uk
ISSN:	1751-7788
Last Modified:	29 Jan 2025 16:27
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/4090

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