Xie Qingliang – Inheritor of Liu Sanjie’s Ballads

Listen to Xie Qingliang’s folk songs and you will find they include a number of smart and appropriate analogies of daily life related to his careful and sensitive observations. Folk songs are by definition based on everyday life, which is why they are popular with everyday people: Song is life, life is song, and the two are inseparable.  For example, Xie sings:  

Others cultivated rice, which is flowering early,

But our field has just been plowed.

Despite the dry climate, I plant sugarcane; 

’Cause I know when it will shoot.

The everyday language used is accessible to everyone and appeals to listeners. Therefore, Xie has always paid attention to accumulating local idioms from people around him. However, the most charming factor of folk songs, according to Xie, lies in their improvisation. Xie also believes folk songs need to move with the times and reflect the contemporary lives of common people. In his words, people come to folk song events mostly for entertainment. Therefore, compositions must be closely related to their lives and reality.

In keeping with current trends and local tastes Xie Qingliang developed his musicality by composing four delightful, modern tunes: the Dongping tune, the Tongbiao tune, the Lilailuo tune (meaning “good and plenty” in the ethnic Zhuang language) and the Melody King tune. These four tunes are well known by many folk singers today. Moreover, Xie enjoys innovating and rewriting lyrics. After three or four performances he usually shelves his lyrics. Nowadays, Xie writes love songs for folk song festivals during the farming low season. Looking at his mounting pile of musical scores, Xie said he would rearrange them when he was too old to walk.  

In 2006, the Liu Sanjie ballads were listed among the first group of national intangible cultural heritage items. Xie Qingliang was named an inheritor of national intangible cultural heritage in 2012. At the award ceremony, he even improvised a folk song to express his excitement at receiving this honor.

Resorting to New Media

On the subject of heritage, Xie believes that in order to pass on and develop the tradition of folk songs, one needs to learn from other artistic forms. In the last 20 years, xiaopin, a type of Chinese comedy in the form of a short skit between two or more performers, has become popular. Noticing this trend, Xie came up with an idea to borrow features of xiao-pin and add them to his folk songs, thus extending their appeal to a wider audience. But he admits he knows little about how to teach the art of folk singing to the next generation. “All I can do is give advice to competition novices,” he said. 

Social media has been another channel through which Xie Qingliang has been able to promote the art of folk singing in recent years, and it has enabled him to connect with folk fans across the country. He has discovered that folk song enthusiasts come from all walks of life but the Internet gives them a common platform to share their compositions with fellow singers. Xie Qingliang regards these netizens as the ideal inheritors of folk songs and the Internet as the perfect modern-day method for disseminating the art of folk singing.  

However, as with many aspects of modern culture, the Internet is both a blessing and curse for the art of antiphonal singing. The problem with taking folk singing forward in the cyber era is that it risks losing contact with its roots – the masses, rural culture and folklore. Xie has found that some of the songs pay too much attention to grace of wording, which takes away the fun and entertainment of spontaneous, improvised antiphony. To counter this risk, Xie plans to organize some online folk song activities and invite experienced and talented folk song singers to take part. He sings: