“Songs of Malice and Spite”?: Wales, Prince Charles, and an Anti-Investiture Ballad of Dafydd Iwan

Abstract

The investiture as Prince of Wales of Charles Windsor in 1969 occasioned extraordinary debate and dissent in Wales. Welsh-language protest singer and language activist Dafydd Iwan (1943-) was a key figure in this debate, penning several successful anti-investiture songs. The record-breaking single ‘Carlo’ (1969) has been the subject of extensive analysis by musicologists and cultural historians, but its successor, ‘Croeso Chwe Deg Nain’ (‘Welcome Sixty-Nine’; 1969) has been neglected, in spite of its equally impressive rhetorical force and respectable showing in the Welsh charts. This article seeks to demonstrate that ‘Croeso Chwe Deg Nain’ articulated a separate facet of the Welsh nationalist reaction to the investiture, lampooning the perceived servility of the Welsh towards the monarchy rather than the investiture itself. Even as Iwan was at pains to stress the ballad's status as a ‘comic song’, there were those in Wales who were not only prepared to find political resonances in the song's text, but were in positions to offer interpretations of the song's meaning that affected audience responses to it at the most fundamental level.