History comes alive when Yang is on song
Print Edition
Yang Atao, 84, becomes excited when asked about the songs people used to sing while working in the fields. He was a village leader in the 1950s and 1960s, and led villagers to work all day long in the fields while singing folk songs.
Today, when Yang sings, staff from the Waigang Town Culture and Sports Service Center record the songs to save them for posterity. The center plans to visit all villagers who remember the field songs with an aim to present singing and dancing programs in nearby villages.
Back when Yang was in his 20s, field songs were popular in the west of Jiading, including Waigang and Wangxin. There was a saying: “Sing upon going to the field and yell when going out of the door.” It is recorded that most of the Waigang field songs originated from the melodies of Suzhou, Changshu and other parts of China. The songs are lively and vivid in melody and easy to understand lyrically. Before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the field songs of Waigang were most famed in Quanjing, Gutang, Zhongjing and Zhoujing villages at the border of Kunshan and Taicang of Jiangsu Province.
Wang Fang, director of the Waigang Center, said she often heard adults sing the songs when she was a child. “The villagers who were good at singing sang songs to each other in turn, just like scenes in movies,” Wang said. However, field songs were banned during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and are now on the brink of extinction.
Saving traditional culture
In 1986, the national government decided it was imperative to save traditional culture and collect folk songs, stories and proverbs. Wei Jialai, 65, began to save field songs at that time. He and his colleagues at the Wangxin Culture Station collected more than 1,000 field songs in Waigang Town alone.
Field songs have long been considered unsophisticated and sung by illiterate singers. The field songs still existing today have been passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. “For example, there are at most four people in Wangxin who are able to sing ‘Shaoshengguan,’ a field song with over 20,000 sentences of 5,048 stanzas. It was originally circulated in handwritten copies, but they had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s, around 100 locals could sing the song in its entirety but only three or four of them are alive today, and all of them are aged over 80,” Wei said.
He said that speed was of the essence if they wanted to protect more field songs for future generations.
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