Culture
The band Stereophonics comes from Cwmaman. On 14 December 2007, in association with Jo Whiley and her BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge Tour, the Stereophonics returned to Cwmaman to play an exclusive acoustic gig in the Cwmaman Working Men's Club, the venue where the band first performed.
The village is home to the war poet Alun Lewis, and a plaque in what is now Llanwonno Road marks the house where he once lived. Born in 1915 in the village’s Llanwonno Road, Lewis was strongly influenced by his formative years in the depression-era valley. He was also influenced by local issues of his community in the then-called Aberdare Leader and this is proved in his great poem The Mountain over Aberdare, which touches on the desperate poverty that beset the Cynon Valley and the country in this period. However, it was for his war poems, published in two volumes (Raiders Dawn and Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets) that Alun Lewis’s reputation would be made. His name lives on, both as a significant poet and within the village itself, not only in a plaque commemorating the house of his birth, but also in the name of the village’s Cwrt Alun Lewis flats.
Cwmaman Public Hall & Institute is a community-owned enterprise: it consists of a concert room, theatre / cinema and fitness suite
St. Joseph's Church was renovated in 2007. This work included the installation of solar panels on one side of its roof with the aim to sell back energy to the National Grid.
The Cwmaman Music Festival is held at the last weekend of September every year. It started in 2008 and has attracted artists such as Alabama 3, Mike Peters, Killing for Company and many unsigned artists of all genres.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Our culture still holds mothers almost exclusively responsible when things go wrong with the kids. Sensing this ultimate accountability, women are understandably reluctant to give up control or veto power. If the finger of blame was eventually going to point in your direction, wouldn’t you be?”
—Ron Taffel (20th century)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)