Liantan Folk Songs

11.Liantan Folk Songs

Nominating Unit: Yunan County, City of Yunfu

Liantan Folk Songs gain their name from their location, that is, Liantan Town of Yunan County in the South River Basin of East Guangdong Province. According to Records of Ancient Xining County, the songs have been popular among the folks since the Ming Dynasty, and is now commonly found in Yunan, Luoding, Yun’an, Deqing and the surrounding regions.

Sung in vernacular to express the individual’s feelings, love between a man and a woman, to recount unhappy marriage, to eulogize labor production and to narrate big events, they are also applied to occasions of birthday celebrations, moving to new houses and riddle-guessing activities. The rich variety of their performance includes songs of duplicated characters, riddles, word-splitting, twinning, and big talk, etc. Unique in its syntactic structure, the song starts with four characters per beat and develops into multicharacters per beat in a pattern of “seven-seven-seven-three-fi ve-seven”, each line rhyming on the same sound track. The tune is bright and clear, and the melody, though basically the same, conveys feelings of drastic change from high to lowspirits. Performed in solo, duet and chorus (ordinarily called a Challenge Singing Contest), the first few characters in the first line of the following song should be taken from the last few characters in the end line of the previous song to indicate the meaning of “twined” songs. However, only the idea will be carried on, excluding the rhyme. In duet, the last line as a whole is copied from the previous song to form the start of the following one, echoing one another, thus nicknamed as “biting the song’s end.” In chorus, female and male singers as the hosts, sometimes one pair, sometimes several pairs together, standing in a place of higher altitude on stage, respond to songs sung in antiphonal style from the audience, with a lot of the mass taking part.(https://www.daowen.com)

Liantan Folk Songs narrate stories mingled with feelings, so they have a profound implied moral meaning, with vivid characters and is easily memorized. The simple, unsophisticated, primitive but touching style is of great artistic value. As a symbol of art crystallization and cultural identity of people’s long term production labor in South River Basin, it proves signifi cant in the study of the social life in East Guangdong Province.

As time goes by, traditional folk culture is losing its glamour. Liantan Folk Songs are under threat from contemporary pop music. If protection efforts are not made immediately, this historical heritage will risk getting lost or even extinction.