Hakka Mountain Songs
Hakka mountain songs of eastern Guangdong, in seven-character quatrains, high and free, answered across the hills.
Related
Time and place
Hakka mountain songs centre on Meizhou in Guangdong, with Xingning, Jiaoling, Dabu and Wuhua especially active, and Hakka counties in Longyan, Fujian, and southern Jiangxi also singing them. The language is Hakka, the Meizhou accent belonging to the Yue-Tai group, with small tonal differences from county to county. Hakka villages sit in hills and scattered uplands, where a song is a practical way to reach across a valley. Market days, firewood gathering, cattle herding and transplanting are all occasions, and there are evening song gatherings as well.
What happened
After the Hakka migration into eastern Guangdong, mountain songs became part of upland life. One singer would start on one slope and someone on the other would answer, and over time this produced rules for replying and competing: the winner was the one who answered faster and invented better. In the late Qing and Republican period the songs moved from the hills into market towns and teahouses. From the 1950s collectors recorded them in quantity, and they were adapted into song-and-dance drama for the stage.
Musical features
Most songs are seven-character quatrains, with rhyme on lines one, two and four and a turn at line three. The melody rests on a pentatonic frame, most often yu mode, sometimes zhi. The opening is high and the ending long, with vocables such as a, yi and yo filling as much as half a line. Rhythm is free, stretched by speech tone and breath. In dialogue the two singers share one tune and compete through words, especially puns and images.
What to listen for
Start with A Hakka Mountain Song Has Fame, which names its own genre at the outset, and hear how the final word is closed. Then take If I Don't Sing My Heart Won't Open, a Hakka saying, and listen to it stretched into a long phrase. In Meixian Park Has Fine Scenery, town sights are folded into the verse, which is the improvised skill. End with Hard to Sing, Hard to Lift the Tune, where the lift is the leap into high register.
Common misunderstandings
A common mistake is to treat Hakka mountain songs as Cantonese. Hakka and Cantonese are separate languages with different tones and endings. Nor are they the same as the Hakka songs of Taiwan, which use the Sixian and Hailu systems and have their own tunes. And they are not only love songs: narrative, satire, work and current affairs all enter the repertory.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
Sources
- 中国民间歌曲集成全国编辑委员会编，中国民间歌曲集成（中国 ISBN 中心）— 曲目与方言核对，未引用
- The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "China" — framework and dates checked, not quoted
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.