Gymanfa Ganu!

By David Stroup

The Clackamas Review, Jun 21, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

The Gymanfa Ganu 2006 organizers at Bryn Seion church.

photo by DAVID STROUP / Clackamas Review

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You may not be able to pronounce it, but chances are you’ll like the sound of it.

Bryn Seion church is holding its 71st annual Gymanfa Ganu this weekend – a gathering for the Welsh, the Welsh-at-heart and anyone who loves good choral music and community togetherness, held at a church that is itself an unassuming piece of local history south of Oregon City.

But if you come, be prepared to sing. “It’s a participatory event,” Janet Figini said. “When you come to the Gymanfa Ganu, you sing!”

That’s a bit daunting when it comes to the language of the Welsh, or the Cymry, as they call themselves; the tongue’s pronunciation and spelling is sufficiently different from any other language that one regular at the church uses it to lend an air of otherworldliness to a series of fantasy novels he’s written.

“When people come out, hearing they’re going to sing in Welsh maybe scares them a little bit,” Figini said. Fortunately, they offer pronunciation guides, as well as what Figini called “the universal Welsh pronunciation of ‘la, la, la!’”

Roots music

The tradition of the Gymanfa Ganu goes back a long way – as does the church, and some of the people who attend it.

Betty Pierce immigrated from Wales in the 1940s, and she remembers the singing traditions in the old country. “What we would do – after chapel on Sunday – is we would meet and learn one hymn, and practice that hymn, and then all of the chapels would get toether and sing that one hymn.”

They would walk around the streets of the town singing, “and then we would go back to the chapel for tea. I remember doing that as a kid – and I have pictures of my mom doing it. And we would carry a banner for our chapel – because we were chapel,” she emphasized.

Fellow immigrant John Cadle explains the distinction: “It’s one of the first thing they would ask you in Wales – are you ‘church’ or ‘chapel?’”

‘Church’ meaning ‘Church of England’ – ‘chapel’ meaning the smaller local denominations.

Pierce, Cadle, Figini and the others – fantasy author Bill Burt, longtime member Carolyn Roberts – gathered at the church on a rainy day last week after making plans for the upcoming festival. They inspected the building itself and the old tea house – or Ty Te – next door. They’ve begun to show their age; the simple white church, built on a foundation of large rocks from the area, celebrated its centennial in 1984.

The tea house is a worn, one-room structure lined with mementos and photographs and dominated by a beautiful antique stove that’s nearly as old as the church itself. Bryn Seion is now a nondenominational Christian church, serving a congregation that’s united as much by love of music and interest in Celtic culture as anything else.

Pierce moved to America in 1947, to get married, and later traveled across the country to Oregon.

“When I came to Oregon in 1963 – I found out about the church in ’65, from the Welsh society in Portland. I came out to the church for the first Gymanfa Ganu I attended, and I’ve been coming to the church for 40-something years.”

Cadle left Great Britain after deciding that there was little keeping him there.

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