The folk songs of northern Shaanxi have endured for a long time and are unique, not only because of its strong people's character, but also because of the particularity of its artistic reflection.
Most of the folk songs in northern Shaanxi that are popular today were produced in the sixty or seventy years from the end of the 19th century to the 1940s. This period was a period of intense social change in China, a period in which various social contradictions and struggles were increasingly intensified, and it was also the period when folk songs in northern Shaanxi flourished most. It comprehensively reflects social changes, social conflicts and class struggles. Some of these works reflect these contradictory struggles in a direct and positive way. For example, in "Growing Foreign Cigarettes" and some Xintianyou, it reflects the people of northern Shaanxi's resistance to foreign aggression: "Foreign cigarettes are foreign grass, whoever eats foreign cigarettes will be ruined①", "If you ride a horse without riding on three legs, you can make friends." "I don't want to be a foreign smoker", "I'll crush your foreign cigarette lamp with one foot and make it impossible for you to smoke foreign cigarettes!" and so on. A batch of "Changgong Songs" directly reveal class contradictions and reflect the people of northern Shaanxi's resistance to the oppression and exploitation of the feudal ruling class. In particular, revolutionary historical folk songs comprehensively reflect the revolutionary struggle under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and are a precious collection of revolutionary historical materials.
① In Northern Shaanxi dialect, it means bad luck.
However, among the seven or eight thousand northern Shaanxi folk songs that have been seen so far, such works are still only a minority. So, what do other works describe? ------Those extremely ordinary trivial matters in life: the young daughter-in-law misses her parents' family, the older girl longs to get married, the baby girl tells fortunes, the drummer welcomes the bride, the traveler misses his hometown, the young people fall in love, the husband and wife quarrel and joke, etc. In addition, there are cats and dogs, flowers and plants, mountains and rivers; although there are thousands of characters described, they are all ordinary and not much different from real people in life: gray-headed long-term workers, A woman who has been bullied, a kind and timid farmer, a young man with well-developed limbs and "short-sightedness", a smooth-talking salesman, a lovesick girl, a dim-witted gambler, a second-rate man, a vagrant, "an infatuated woman", " A heartless man". There are also some villains: arrogant soldiers, wealthy landowners, beard-blowing and eye-catching tycoons, etc. None of these people seems to be outstanding. They are all like a group of busy ants going around in their own small circle, with few earth-shattering feats.
Judging from the surface of the song, it seems that it has not captured any "major themes" and mostly describes some insignificant things in life. For example, the song "A Big Girl Raises a Baby": "The white grid is raw and green, and the crisp grid is biting, and the big girl is raising a baby and is born..." It describes a big girl who gave birth to a child because of an affair. The parents hate their daughter, but the daughter still loves her child. The last paragraph of the work:
Call me mom and don’t be angry.
稆生①Dolls are good.
① Rice plant, generally called "willow tree" in northern Shaanxi. Willow trees do not need to be specially planted, new branches will sprout by themselves from the roots. This word generally refers to a child without a father, an illegitimate child.
It is full of humanistic maternal love, and it is difficult to find any ideological aspect in it.
Another example is a Xintian tour:
Wear blue, all blue,
It's like Lu Bu playing with Diao Chan.
Wear gray, be all gray,
Like pigeons flying all over the sky.
Wear black, all black...
It's all about clothes and clothing, and doesn't include any ideological themes. There is a song called "Ten Insufficiencies", which actually has the edge of "thought": "When I see my brother smiling, listen to me sing Ten Insufficiencies again." What is it singing? ------
My body is cold and my belly is hungry,
Just now I have food and I am greedy for clothes.
All the fine satin robes and coats were put on,
Thinking that there is no clever wife in the family.
Marry both the big and the little wives,
When thinking, there is no horse to ride.
...
It’s not that this person died,
It's too low to reach the horizon.
Okay, there is no need to give any more examples. As long as you are willing, just pick up a book of folk songs in northern Shaanxi and flip through it at will. From this, we can have a general understanding of the traditional folk songs of northern Shaanxi: the subject matter it chooses cannot be too trivial, the characters it describes cannot be too ordinary, and the life aspect it shows cannot be too narrow. , compared to formulaic works, it cannot be less than strange. Such a reflection may be ridiculed and despised by some people. Over the years, there have been several articles commenting on folk songs in northern Shaanxi, but the ones that opened were those Changgong songs, and the ones that closed were those "Brother from the Red Army Is Back" and "Shandandan Blooms Red and Gorgeous". It seems that there are only These few songs are considered valuable, while a large number of other songs are not mentioned much or not at all. This phenomenon is by no means accidental. It is directly related to the erosion of the ultra-left line reflected in literature and art.
Social life is an extremely complex and rich whole. Although class contradictions and class struggles are the main content of social life, they are not the whole of social life. Class conflicts and struggles include many forms of expression, rather than direct confrontation. In concrete life, it is mostly expressed in indirect forms.
Traditional folk songs in northern Shaanxi use a lot of space to show some ordinary and trivial lives and depict a large number of ordinary characters. This is by no means a boring word game. On the contrary, it reflects their rich experience and profound understanding of social life. It can be said that each of their songs is meaningful and valuable to them. The trivial things described in each song contain their understanding of social life, attitudes, feelings and pursuit of beauty. It's just that it's more profound. Let’s give an example. Such as the song "Happy Guy". "Taking a partner" is a dialect in northern Shaanxi. Translated, it means "marrying a wild man", or more civilized, "finding a lover". The title of the song seems a bit vulgar, but the song actually describes a pregnant girl asking a "battle-hardened" woman for advice on how to find a lover. The style seems low. Objectively speaking, things like "picking up guys" were very common in northern Shaanxi in the past, and the heroine in the song was also a common figure in life. However, the content of life revealed in this ordinary event and that ordinary person is extremely rich and profound. Through the woman telling her "student" how she was sold to someone else in an arranged marriage, how she was abandoned by her husband and became a widow when she was eighteen or nineteen years old, how she was forced to have sex with five men in a row and was abandoned again and again due to livelihood constraints. , resulting in a lonely, helpless life experience for the rest of her life, silently and vividly indicting the evils committed by feudal ethics and ethics on women, and revealing the tragic fate of the vast number of working women in feudal society.
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