William Lloyd

William Lloyd (1786–1852) was a Welsh musician, music teacher, and composer of hymn tunes from Rhos-goch, Llaniestyn, on the Llŷn Peninsula. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography records that he came from a musical family and traveled around Llŷn conducting music classes and hymnody festivals. He also taught pupils who came to his home. A local tradition remembered him as a cattle-drover, though the biographical source presents that detail as tradition rather than established fact.

Lloyd composed numerous hymn tunes, but his enduring reputation rests chiefly on the melody now known as MEIRIONYDD. In Lloyd’s own manuscript book the tune was called BERTH. It first appeared in print under that name in Richard Mills’s Caniadaeth Seion in 1840. The later name MEIRIONYDD refers to the historic Welsh county with which the tune became associated. Its double 7.6.7.6 meter allowed it to carry many English and Welsh hymn texts, and it eventually entered hymnals well beyond Wales.

The tune’s transmission illustrates the importance of local teachers and festival musicians in nineteenth-century Welsh congregational song. Lloyd was not a professional metropolitan composer but a regional musician whose work passed into a much wider repertory. He died on June 7, 1852, according to the inscription on his tombstone in Llaniestyn churchyard. Later hymnals pair MEIRIONYDD with numerous texts, including “The Voice of God Is Calling,” but that pairing is later than the text’s first publication.