Ottoma dhe’n Yeth Kernewek: Cornish Language Song in North America

Cornish Language Song in North America

by Nicholas Booker

The Ohio State University

The Cornish flag flies outside of the opera house in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, USA for the annual Cornish Festival / Photo by Nicholas Booker

One day when I was eight or nine years old, my mother took a book out of a package she had just received from our family in South Australia. We lived in Colorado Springs, Colorado in the United States, about 9,000 miles from our family in Adelaide. So, it was always an important occasion when we received anything from the Aussie side of her Nicholls family. I remember the moment clearly. Emerging from the envelope was a book with ornate blue script that read My Ancestors were Cornish: The Nicholls Family 1799–1999. The book eventually found its way into a box in the basement. It gathered dust, and I thought very little of it for a long time.

Over twenty years later, in the summer of 2022, I crossed the Tamar for the first time and entered Cornwall. A woman in my train car welcomed her travelling companions home. Someone in the group commented that more of the signs should be in the Cornish language. Everyone agreed. A key turning point in my life had occurred the year prior. I started my Ph.D. program in musicology and ethnomusicology here at The Ohio State University in the United States in 2021, and I knew two crucial things at the time. I knew I could sing quite a bit of Scottish, Irish, and British music, and I knew that somewhere in a dusty old box at my mum’s house in Colorado, there was a book called My Ancestors were Cornish. These two ideas led to many questions that eventually took me to Cornwall and to places like Mineral Point, Wisconsin in the United States and Toronto, Ontario in Canada too.

Jim Harris, a singer in The Choughs Choir in Mineral Point, Wisconsin here in the United States, recently told me that he sang ‘Bro Goth Agan Tasow’ with the choir in December of 2023 at the bottom of Wisconsin’s Bevans Mine. The song also appears in Cornish in a workshop booklet for the 1999 Gathering of the Cornish Cousins created by a well-known singer in the Cornish-American community, Marion Howard. There, she says of it, ‘Bro Goth Agan Tasow is a song all Cornish should learn. It is the universal Celtic song’ (Howard 1999). For Marion’s rendition, she references Ralph Dunstan’s 1929 Cornish Song Book or Lyver Canow Kernewek and acknowledges the use of the song in Gorsedh Kernow ceremonies. Marion would know those ceremonies well since she was made a bard herself in 1998.

Elsewhere in her workshop book, Marion references Merv Davey’s 1983 text Hengan and his version of ‘Deulagas Byghan / Little Eyes / Little Lize.’ She includes the first verse of the song in Cornish. ‘Little Lize’ was originally an American minstrel show song called ‘Liza Loves You,’ though. As Hilary Coleman and Sally Burley point out in their 2015 book Shout Kernow: Celebrating Cornwall’s Pub Songs, the song was written in 1885 by the American Charles H. Sheffer before the Black American male vocal group the Deep River Boys eventually recorded the version that caught the attention of the Cornish group The Joy Boys (Coleman & Burley 2015). So, it is remarkable to see the song back in the United States with the first verse translated into Cornish!

The process of recording folk and traditional music has become a primary focus of my research. The Cornish-American singer and songwriter Jim Wearne has mostly recorded music in English, but he has recorded songs in Cornish, too. That has sometimes involved translation, as in the case of ‘Mordarth’res’ from his 2012 album A Bit of Your Time, a translation of the 1963 hit ‘Surfer Girl’ by the Beach Boys. ‘Pysk, Cober ha Sten’ (‘Fish, Copper and Tin’), the title track of his 2010 album, is a great example of his writing in the Cornish language. Jim told me he wanted it to be ‘a sort of Cornish drinking song’ involving the toast ‘pysk, sten, ha cober.’ He eventually reached out to several friends and colleagues including Marion Howard from Wisconsin and Pol Hodge from Cornwall about writing verses, and the latter wrote a verse in the Cornish language that Jim recorded on the album:

Ottoma dhe’n yeth Keltek

a wra Kernow Kernewek

Sowsnek yw saw tros

‘tho ni a wra mos

Hag eva dhe Gernewek

Here it is in English:

Here’s to the Celtic language

That makes Cornwall Cornish

English is just a noise

So we will go

And drink to Cornish

This multilingual song is fascinating in its own right as a transatlantic collaboration started by a Cornish-American songwriter with an idea in the Cornish language and some very inventive music. What do these uses of the Cornish language do for communities, though? Pol Hodge suggests that the language helps to make Cornwall Cornish. So, it stands to reason that it makes Cornish-Americans and Cornish-Canadians feel more Cornish. Marion Howard’s statement that the Cornish language song ‘Bro Goth agan Tasow’ is something ‘all Cornish should learn’ seems to align with Hodge’s statement in one case. In general, I get the sense that these uses of the Cornish language in North American communities do help some people to feel more connected to Cornwall. Thus, while they may be comparatively few in number in the context of an enormous North American music scene, they’re still important. Like that dusty old copy of My Ancestors Were Cornish in my mother’s basement, each Cornish language song in North America could very well be the spark of inspiration that changes someone’s life.

Bibliography

Coleman, Hilary and Sally Burley. 2015. Shout Kernow: Celebrating Cornwall's Pub Songs. London: Francis Boutle.

Davey, Merv. 1983. Hengan: Traditional Folk Songs, Dances and Broadside Ballads Collected in Cornwall. Redruth: Dyllansow Truran.

Dunstan, Ralph. 1929. Cornish Song Book - Lyver Canow Kernewek. London: Reid Brothers.

Howard, Marion. 1999. "Up Camborne Hill and Beyond: Songs of the Cornish and Cornish Americans."July 29–August 1.