The temperature is still hovering around 80 degrees and all I can hear coming from the bar is the sound of Welsh hymn singing. The accents all mingle together with the vowels and drawl of Ohio, Pennsylvania and California mixing in a cocktail with Swansea, Ynys Mon and Brecon. With every new friend I meet I encounter people with an extreme love for Wales. Most have never been there but find themselves drawn to the culture and history by family stories handed down over generations with tales of lost ancestors. This is the North American Festival of Wales and I love it.
Every year all of the various Welsh Societies in North America, including Canada, come together for a celebration of all things Welsh. This week started with a very fine reception hosted by the North American distributor of Penderyn Whiskey. This evening I hosted a concert featuring The winners of the 2024 Urdd Eisteddfod and Mared, a singer form North Wales who has found fame singing her own songs and performing in the West End.
Mared and Morgan Elwy outside the Westin Pittsburg.
Kirk the harpist came all the way from Ohio to set the scene at the opening of the show with a magic mix of old Welsh folk tunes. He was also there to play for a performance of Cerdd Dant (literally dancing teeth). It’s a wonderfully Welsh art form where the harpist plays one tune and the singing effortlessly glides around the melody whilst never quite matching it exactly. It’s a bit like a Welsh version of free form jazz …but a bit more complicated.
Fair play to Kirk, with a surname like Kupensky he probably doesn’t have that much actual Welsh blood in his veins, but he had made a real effort by dressing in a St David’s tartan kilt.
The Penderyn Whiskey Tasting Experience proved very popular.
The Urdd singers Branwen and Rose were extraordinary in skill and control. Their talent giving them a competence well beyond their years. In speaking to Branwen it was obvious that this transatlantic trip was going to have a profound impact on her life. She told me she really didn’t want to go back to Wales. It was only when she explained that later this week she was going to turn 18 years old and that next Thursday she was returning to school made me realise just how young this travelling troop of Urdd performers actually were.
The party of 4 was made up with Owain who performed poetry in English and Welsh and some Morus dancing. I should say what I meant was that was actually traditional Welsh clog dancing by a lad called Morus rather than that English dance performed by lads in bowler hats and jingle bells. The only hiccup of the evening performance was when the candle that Morus needed for one of his dances refused to light. As an experienced entertained of 18 years Morus simply took the candle to the wings, out of the breeze felt on stage, and waited until his candle was fully lit.
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
It struck me that this chance to perform at an early age is one of the reasons that Wales seems to punch well above its weight when it comes to producing singers and actors. Organisations like the Urdd give youngsters the chance to perform in public from childhood.
This confidence became apparent as I tried to organise the evening. As well as singing my songs I was the nominated MC. I was more than prepared to pop back and fore to introduce each individual Urdd Performer individually, but it soon became clear they were more than happy to do their part and then introduce the next member of the team.
The night also featured Mared from Llannefydd in North Wales. Mared is a singer songwriter who has also starred in the West End. Singing naturally in English and Welsh, she performs songs she had written as well as West End Standards. You could tell that she was extremely comfortable on stage and that must have been down to the experiences as afforded to her as a youngster back home in the Land of Song.
Anyway, back to the bar. The Urdd singers actually were too young to be in the bar. To be honest the sound had a much more masculine and mature quality. The reason was that this evening the Dunvant and Brecon choirs had arrived from Washington. They had flown out to the USA last Monday but instead of going straight to Pittsburgh they had decided to make a bit more of a holiday of it by travelling initially to DC as I now call it!
As we bumped glasses in the festival bar on the second floor of the Westin Hotel I asked a few members of the choir how DC had been. I told them I had seen the pictures of them singing the National Anthem outside the White House. It looked like the experience of a lifetime.
‘Mal Bach it was dreadful, over 100 degrees in the shade. Mind you we had a lovely welcome in the bar owned by Andy Coleman’s father.’
Andy is the current Chairman of Swansea City.
‘I don’t think they knew what to expect, I was told, but they seemed to enjoy a bit of a sing song with us.’
Now I must admit Pittsburgh had taken me aback for a number of different reasons. I really wasn’t expecting it to be so hot. But at 100 degrees, Washington made the 90 degree welcome I had received from the Steel town sound positively balmy. I also wasn’t expecting Pittsburgh to be so shiny and new. Pittsburgh traces its roots back to the 1700’s when a young George Washington built a fort there to protect the meeting point of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers in the French and Indian War. It was soon lost to the French before being retaken by the British and named after Pitt the Elder.
Its strategic position at the gateway to the West made it rich on trade and commerce but it soon became known as Iron or Steel Town as heavy industry took over. Being early adopters gave them a massive initial advantage but as the years passed, as technology moved on and as globalisation made competition more intense, Pittsburgh soon found itself struggling to compete. In the end it seems to have decided to accept that the world has moved on and instead carved out a place for itself as a centre of excellence for Medical Research and Robotics.
As I stood at Point Park, with the fountain at my back, looking towards the skyscrapers that now make up the Pittsburgh skyline I couldn’t help but think that if Pittsburgh can do it why can’t Port Talbot.
The Festival are certainly making me work with a Keynote Speech about my 50 years in music and broadcasting and a seminar on the life of the Boxer Tommy Farr. I’ll be back home in Swansea before you know it and planning ahead for my concert at the Arena but strange as it may seem there will always be a part of me here in Pennsylvania.