Cultural identity, community, and collective memory in post-industrial South Wales: Investigating the role of shared musical experiences

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This project will examine if and how shared musical experiences affect ideas of cultural identity, community, and collective memory in post-industrial South Wales. Despite burgeoning interest in popular music heritage and its relationship withcultural identity (Cohen et al. 2015), the everyday musical lives of people in the towns of South Wales have been overlooked in musicological literature. This omission means that the cultural-musical identities of this population areunderrepresented. As such, little insight has been provided on how to engage further this demographic's participation with the arts and Welsh cultural heritage. This project aims to redress this imbalance. Drawing together recent trends in popular music studies, community studies and cultural sociology, this interdisciplinary research will contribute to the emerging field of popular music heritage and offer a new perspective to cultural studies of Welsh identity. In emphasising the voices and lived experiences of an underrepresented demographic, this project aims to re-evaluate regional pasts and futures in a globalised world and considers the many diverse experiences that constitute "being Welsh."In contrast to post-devolution insistence on a civic Welsh identity (Brooks 2009), research suggests Wales continues to be divided by "hierarchical nationhood"-thatsome regions are perceived to be more "Welsh" than others (Evans 2019). Although Welsh identity is regarded as having a strong sense of local belonging and attachment to place (Day 2010), the nature of this "Welshness" is contested and can be constructed differently depending on locality, region, and a lived experience of place.Music can play an important role in the way people define their relationship to local, everyday surroundings (Whitelely et al. 2004), as "signs of community, belonging and a shared past" (Lewis 1992, 144). Despite the current attentiveness of music scholars to cultural identity and heritage (Cohen et al. 2015, Brandellero et al. 2014), studies of Welsh music have either focused on the urban "scenes" of cities such as Cardiff (Coates 2012), or on "traditional" music-making and Welsh-language pop (Jones 2015; Hill 2007), reinforcing the popular discourse that some places or regions are more "national" than others (Edensor 2002). This project will explore the rolelocal music experiences play in identity construction with a specific spatial and cultural focus: the English-speaking, post-industrial South Wales communities, what Balsom (1985) terms "Welsh Wales." Whilst "Welsh Wales" has been the focus of much social science research, it is noticeably excluded from music studies, and ethnographic research on the everyday musical lives of this demographic is insufficient.One such event this project will explore is the Porthcawl Elvis Festival. The festival, the largest Elvis- themed event in the world, takes place annually in the post- industrial seaside town of Porthcawl and attracts more visitors than Memphis Elvis Week, with 35,000 attending in 2018 (BBC 2018). Despite this, it is described by its organiser as a "very Welsh event" that is particularly well-supported by the Valleys (BBC 2018)-a "working-class Eisteddfod" (Minhinnick 2012). Place lies at the core of this "Welsh" event's identity; Porthcawl was renowned for its "miners' fortnight" and was vital to the leisure activities of the South Wales working classes in thetwentieth century (Pincombe 2011). As such, the festival is bound in discourses of nostalgia which are specifically placed within collective memory, raising complex questions about the relationship between music, Welshness and place.