About Yazhou Folk Song 崖州民歌

The Yazhou folk song(崖州民歌Yázhōu mín'gē) is one of the ancient styles of Hainan folk song. It is popular in Sanya, Huangliu Village of Ledong County and the affiliated territory to ancient Yazhou. The old Yazhou folk song is still popular nowadays. It is a kind of Chinese ballad intonated in Hakka dialect. The folk song has extremely precise rhythm and is an independent integration(if someone integrates into a social group, or is integrated into it, they behave in such a way that they become part of the group or are accepted into it), originating from countryside of "West Six Kilometers" in ancient Yazhou and spreading all around.

Two factors contributed to the formation of Yazhou folk song: one was the continuous settlement of the migrants from central China, who brought folk songs into Yazhou from various regions; the other is that after the migrants living together for a long time, local accent and folk custom of Yazhou came into being, and then evolved or generated the vulgar, strong dialectal(belonging to or characteristic of a dialect) Yazhou folk song with considerable local colors later. Chorography of Yazhou has no definite records on the origin of Yazhou folk song. But we can infer from the recent collection of Yazhou folk songs that it purportedly arose in the Song Dynasty, and bloomed in the late Qing Dynasty. At the very beginning, only the scholars sung the songs to express their feelings. Shortly the folk song spread among the laboring people. Its sigh tone sourced from fast songs, and its lyric was close to seven-character-regular-verse in the Tang Dynasty. Apparently, it was influenced by Tang poetry.

Yazhou folk songs have extensive materials and rich contents. Most of the lyrics consist of seven characters, involving all fields of social life, such as humanity, history, landscape, production and labor. There are more than one hundred pieces of narrative long poem found. They are the rarities of Yazhou folk songs. The melody of Yazhou folk song is graceful and pleasant. It contains work song, peddling tone, major key, tender key, sign tone, minor key, etc. Common songs include Seeing off the Beau Ten Times, Song of Scholar Liang, Song of Scholar Zhang, Meng Lijun, Park of Spring Forever and so on.

Yazhou folk songs have precise rhythms. Among the four lyrics of each song (or each segment), the endings of the first, the second and the fourth sentences are required to rhyme (no rhyme of the first sentence is not allowed). The pitches at the ends of the four sentences are strictly stipulated to be the entering tone (or the first tone), the first tone, the entering tone and the second tone one after another. It means except the first sentence can have some flexibility, the ending tones of the other three sentences can't be changed. Besides ending tones, the pronunciation of other words must be in the pattern of level and oblique tones as much as possible. The tone of the fourth character in each sentence requires particular strictness(a strict rule or order is very clear and precise or severe and must always be obeyed completely).