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Describe the atmosphere and live music at a local pub, restaurant, festival, church or temple, club night.... inspire other people to check it out!
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Musician: Julie Murphy
Location: Pencader, West Wales
Instruments: voice/ guitar
Music: traditional Welsh and singer/songwriter.
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 ΜύΜύListen (4'07) to Julie Murphy play 'Hiraeth Am Feirion' from the album Ffawd (Fflach 2001)
Listen to Julie Murphy in the World on Your Street tent at WOMAD 2003
'When we were young. we used to go to different healers and do some spiritual ceremonies.'
How I came to this music:
I was brought up in Essex and as a child I sang in a church choir. I always loved singing but I didn't really find an outlet for it once I'd given up church, like you do as a teenager, discovering boys and everything! But I did discover soul music, so that's a big influence. While I was studying painting at arts school in Maidstone, I met my partner Ceri Rhys Matthews, who is Welsh. Before that I hadn't really heard much folk music, but one day by chance I heard somebody singing unaccompanied. It reminded me of singing church music, and I remember being struck by the power of it. And that's what sort of sparked it off.
We got married and moved to Wales in 1982 and I started listening to lots of other peoples' songs, on CDs mainly, which is a great teacher. At first we lived in Cardiff, but then as we moved west, I started to learn Welsh, which opened up another world of song. And together with Ceri I started a band called Fernhill in 1996. Obviously as a singer you're naturally going to be drawn to the place where you are, and a lot of my songs come from where I find myself now. But I listen to lots of other stuff as well, particularly singers from the Appalachian tradition and general European folk song, like fado.
Where I play:
 The most intimate setting has been singing lullabies to my sons when they were babies and the most public to date was a concert in the Sudan in front of six thousand people on a British Council tour. My travels with the Council since 1994 have led to one-to-one collaborations with singers from different cultures, and this has had a big effect on my singing and music.
Palestine and Sudan were particularly important and moving experiences. I fell in love with Arabic music: the vocal ornamentation is extraordinary and seems so effortless. I wanted to touch the singer's throat while they were singing to feel what was going on inside there! I've never tried to copy it but i'm sure I've absorbed something of it. I won't ever forget the first time I heard the air across a city filled with the sound of a single voice calling people to prayer. A CD could never compete with that.
I sing all over the place, like for example just this summer, I'm going be doing Belgium, Vancouver and Abergavenny in the space of two weeks. But I also sing at home, which is important. So I do play in festivals and arts centre in the UK as well, particularly in Wales. Fernhill played WOMAD last year and it looks like I'm going to be there this summer now with Dylan Fowler in the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 3 tent.
A favourite song:
That's really difficult 'cos there's loads of them! I could have chosen a ten-minute praise poem about a cow, but instead I'm going to choose Hiraeth Am Feirion (Longing for Feirion') from the 2002 album called Ffawd, which I made with Dylan.
Hiraeth is quite difficult to translate into English, a bit like saudade in Portuguese. It's a feeling, an emotion. I just love everything about this song. The melody is to die for and I love the poetry in it as well. It's got an incredible intensity and passion about it, almost unbearable, like a perfect marriage between the melody and the meaning and then the emotion in there as well. The first part of the song is about longing for a place, but as the song progress, the narrator says it's actually the boy that's there that's she's longing for. So it's a love song, really.
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