Stevie Nicks
Singer-songwriter (Fleetwood Mac and solo)
Stephanie "Stevie" Lynn Nicks was born on 26 May 1948 in Phoenix, Arizona, and is American through and through: she grew up moving between Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and California before settling near Los Angeles. She is not of documented Welsh birth, and claims of Welsh ancestry circulating online could not be traced to any credible genealogical source, so we do not repeat them here. Her place on this site rests on something different and rather more interesting: a genuine, decades-long artistic connection to Welsh mythology.
In the early 1970s, Nicks read the novel Triad by Mary Leader, which introduced her to Rhiannon, a magical, otherworldly figure from Welsh legend. The story captivated her enough to write "Rhiannon", one of Fleetwood Mac's best-loved songs, in 1973. Years later, a fan sent her further reading that traced Rhiannon's roots back to the Mabinogion, the medieval collection of Welsh tales, including Evangeline Walton's novelised adaptations. Nicks was struck enough by them to buy the film rights, and has spoken for decades about her hope of bringing the story to the screen.
That fascination has never entirely faded: more than fifty years after she first sang the name, Nicks is still publicly associated with Rhiannon and the wider world of the Mabinogion, and Welsh commentators have written at length about her outsized role in popularising a piece of Welsh mythology to a global audience. It is a cultural connection rather than a family one, and we present it here as exactly that.