Xingguo Mountain Songs

Hakka mountain songs of Xingguo in southern Jiangxi, opening with a ringing cry and moving into narrative and improvised reply.

Related

Shange (Mountain Songs)XintianyouVoice

Time and place

Xingguo lies in southern Jiangxi, where the Lian River, a tributary of the Gong, cuts through hills and uplands. The songs are in southern Jiangxi Hakka, closely related to the Hakka of Meizhou in Guangdong and Longyan in Fujian, with differences of tone and vocabulary. They are sung in fields, on hill paths and at markets, and in the 1930s also at mass meetings of the Soviet areas. The county town and the market towns were the nodes through which songs travelled from village to town and back.

What happened

Xingguo songs began as work songs and exchanges between young men and women, one voice starting and the other answering, words made up on the spot. In the 1930s Xingguo was a model county of the Central Soviet, and songs were used for recruitment, supply campaigns and propaganda: old tunes took new words and were sung louder than before. After 1949 cultural workers collected them, arranged them for the stage and put them into teaching materials. In recent decades, as the old singers died, recordings and heritage protection became the main means of keeping them.

Musical features

The most striking feature is the cry "ai ya lei", a long high call that signals across the valley before the verse begins. The verse usually runs to four seven-character lines, mostly narrative, with long ornamented endings. The melody rests on a pentatonic frame, often yu mode, with a wide range and many leaps. Rhythm is free, stretched by speech tone and breath. In dialogue the two singers share one tune and compete through wit and speed of reply.

What to listen for

Begin with a Hakka opening and hear how the first sound lifts from low to high and then settles back into speech register. The Xingguo cry fixes that gesture. Then listen to the ending, which gives the singer time to breathe and plan the next line. In the replies, the quick singer often repeats the other's ending and then turns it to a new point.

Common misunderstandings

A common mistake is to hear all Xingguo songs as revolutionary songs. The Soviet period did produce many new texts, but the tunes and singing style come from an older mountain-song tradition. Nor is "ai ya lei" a casual filler: it is the opening signal, fixing the height and the breath of the whole song. Xingguo songs are also not the tea-picking tunes of southern Jiangxi opera, which have moved into theatre.

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）— 曲目与赣南方言核对，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.