Hyfrydol: A Song History
HYFRYDOL is a Welsh hymn tune by Rowland Huw Prichard, a precentor and amateur musician from Y Graienyn, near Bala, who championed congregational song for the whole of his life.[1][2] Sources differ slightly on when he wrote it: the Dictionary of Welsh Biography says he was 20, Hymnary.org gives 1830, at nineteen, and the Hymnology Archive reports that same date only as what is said of the tune.[1][2][3] The tune was published in 1844 in his Cyfaill y Cantorion (The Singers' Friend), a collection of about forty hymn tunes, most of them his own.[1][2] The name is glossed differently too, as "tuneful" or "pleasant" on Hymnary.org and as "joyful" by the Hymnology Archive.[2][3] Prichard moved to Holywell in 1880 to work for the Welsh Flannel Manufacturing Company, and he died there in 1887.[1][2]
William Turner, A View from Moel Cynwich: Looking Over the Vale of Afon Mawddach and Toward Cader Idris, watercolor with scratch-away, heightened with white, c. 1850. Shown for its Welsh setting; it has no connection to the tune.
English-language hymnals first took the tune up in the Wesleyan Methodists' Methodist Hymn Book with Tunes (1904), and Ralph Vaughan Williams's harmonization in The English Hymnal (1906) spread it further.[3] In that book it appears as No. 301, set to William Chatterton Dix's "Alleluya, sing to Jesus."[4] Other texts often sung to it include Charles Wesley's "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus," a pairing found at least as early as Toronto's University Hymn Book of 1912, and Wesley's "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling."[2][3]
Gail L. Van Amberg includes it, credited as a Welsh hymn by Rowland Prichard, in the MaxDAD Songbook, 33 tunes arranged for the five-string Folkcraft MaxDAD dulcimer in DADAD tuning with standard notation, chords and MaxDAD tab, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]
Sources
- Dictionary of Welsh Biography: "Prichard, Rowland Huw (1812 - 1887), musician".
- Hymnary.org: "HYFRYDOL".
- Hymnology Archive: "Come, thou long-expected Jesus".
- Hymnary.org: "The English Hymnal (1906), 301: Alleluya, sing to Jesus".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Gail L. Van Amberg, MaxDAD Songbook".
- Image: William Turner, A View from Moel Cynwich: Looking Over the Vale of Afon Mawddach and Toward Cader Idris, watercolor with scratch-away, heightened with white, c. 1850. The Cleveland Museum of Art.