Phil Tanner (16 February 1862 – 19 February 1950) was a Welsh

traditional singer A traditional singer, also known as a source singer, is someone who has learned folk songs in the oral tradition, usually from older people within their community. From around the beginning of the twentieth century, song collectors such as Cecil ...

. He was from Llangenith in the

Gower Peninsula The Gower Peninsula (), or simply Gower (), is a peninsula in the South West Wales, south-west of Wales. It is the most westerly part of the historic county of Glamorgan, and is now within the City and County of Swansea. It projects towards th ...

(

South Wales South Wales ( ) is a Regions of Wales, loosely defined region of Wales bordered by England to the east and mid Wales to the north. Generally considered to include the Historic counties of Wales, historic counties of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire ( ...

Songs and singing style

Tanner was an invaluable source of several once popular English language folk songs, such as the

Child Ballads The Child Ballads are 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century. Their lyrics and Child's studies of them were published as ...

" Barbara Allen" and " Henry Martin", as well as the songs " Sweet Primroses" and " The Bonny Bunch of Roses", all of which were recorded in the 1930s and 40s. His performance of the local Gower

wassailing The tradition of wassailing (also spelled wasselling) falls into two distinct categories: the house-visiting wassail and the orchard-visiting wassail. The house-visiting wassail, which traditionally occurs on the twelfth day of Christmastide ...

song became known as "

Gower Wassail The Gower Wassail is a wassail song from Gower in Wales. Wassailing is a midwinter tradition wherein either orchards or households are blessed by guisers, which came to Wales through exposure to English custom. The song is printed in A.L. Lloyd ...

" and was printed by A.L. Lloyd and covered by popular folk groups including

Steeleye Span Steeleye Span are a British folk rock band formed in 1969 in England by Fairport Convention bass player Ashley Hutchings and established London folk club duo Tim Hart and Maddy Prior. The band were part of the 1970s British folk revival, ...

. His songs were all in the English language, using the Gower dialect, since the Gower of his youth was still culturally distinct from the rest of Wales, and his style of singing is compared to that of English singers.

Audience and broadcasts

Renowned locally as "the Gower Nightingale", he reached a national audience in his seventies with recordings for Columbia and the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

and an appearance on the

BBC radio BBC Radio is an operational business division and service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a royal charter since 1927. The service provides national radio stations cove ...

programme ''

In Town Tonight ''In Town Tonight'' is a BBC radio programme that was broadcast on Saturday evening from 1933 to 1960 (except for a period of 26 weeks in 1937 when ''The BBC presents the ABC'' was broadcast instead). It was an early example of a chat show, o ...

''. Shortly before he died, he was featured in an article by John Ormond Thomas for ''

Picture Post ''Picture Post'' was a photojournalistic magazine published in the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1957. It is considered a pioneering example of photojournalism and was an immediate success, selling 1,000,000 copies a week after only two months. ...

'', and recorded once again by the BBC.

Legacy

In 1976, he was remembered in a

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. The station replaced the BBC Home Service on 30 September 1967 and broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasti ...

tribute by the Welsh

radio Radio is the technology of communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 3 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmitter connec ...

broadcaster Wynford Vaughan-Thomas recalling "the voice of the sanest, happiest, kindest eccentric I ever knew, the voice of Phil Tanner, the Gower Nightingale". His recordings have been reissued several times, most notably on the CD ''The Gower Nightingale'', which also includes the Wynford Vaughan-Thomas radio programme. The editor of one reissue, the eminent

folklorist Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics, tradition studies or folk life studies in the UK) is the academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the ac ...

Alan Lomax Alan Lomax (; January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music during the 20th century. He was a musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activ ...

wrote: "When Phil died, England lost her best traditional singer". Folk revival musicians were inspired by Tanner's songs, particularly "

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tanner, Phil Welsh folk singers Musicians from Swansea 1862 births 1950 deaths People from the Gower Peninsula

Songs and singing style

Audience and broadcasts

Legacy

Further reading

References