England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, may have unofficial anthems, but Wales is the only country in the United Kingdom to have it's own official National Anthem - "Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau" (Land of My Fathers), but always sung in Welsh! Even those of us who don't speak Welsh make a bold attempt at it!
It's a jolly good anthem and to use popular parlance, you can give it plenty of welly! Here it is on You Tube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtCOprRDUm8
I love this rendering so much that, after selecting it, I have played it four times already. My goodness we can sing in Wales and you can imagine how it would feel singing it in rugby stadium with thousands of others?
I'm also very fond of Catatonia singing "Every day when I wake up I thank The Lord I'm Welsh", so let's include that too! It has some lovely views of Wales to look at while listening, which will give you a taste of our varied scenery!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwyR-ir9XX4
I didn't intend this post to go in such a musical nor indeed a national direction, because I was going to talk about William Blake who wrote "Jerusalem". I will save that until next time - it's won't be as boring as it sounds - honestly!
The link to all of this is "National Anthem", because though we in Wales have our own, we also share with the other countries of the UK "God Save the Queen" Now this can sound a bit dreary and though we wouldn't of course drop it, many feel that England should have something more uplifting as an anthem, such as "Jerusalem".
Well - in for a penny in for a pound - here it is too! Hope you are all singing along?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8VH0sbEU20
6 comments:
Mary, that version of your national anthem was AWESOME. Thank you for sharing it.
Diolch yn Fawr......the best time to sing the Welsh National Anthem is in the Millenium stadium ......brought tears to my eyes when I sang it there at a rugby match along with a male voice choir..although it nearly always brings tears to my eyes ...x
Hi Mary, what a great post...it made me remember being in the Proms in the Park in Swansea 2006 and the Welsh National Anthem was played with the words on the big screen and the bouncing ball karaoke style. LOL I recall learning that Welsh words are not remotely pronounced as they look and my mouth was making one sound and everyone elses was making a different 'correct' sound. However I had purchased a Welsh flag for the evening and waved it excitedly, so happy to be there.
I love your blog and have learned so much from reading it. I particularly liked the ability to enlarge the photos to see the quilting. Sadly, since Google Blogger added the lightbox feature, and from what I have learned did so without discussing it with folks who owned the blog, it is really difficult to fully appreciate the photographs. I learned that the following url tells blog owners how to eliminate the lightbox feature. Would you consider doing so? http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/10/how-to-disable-bloggers-lightbox.html
Thank you for a wonderful blog.
Rose Huskey
Rose - thank you for your suggestion - I agree that Blogger has not changed things for the better. I will look it up but I am so nervous about tampering with my blog set-up because if it all went wrong I wouldn't know where to turn as the tecky speak defeats me!
Always love hearing Jerusalem!! Thanks
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