The historical narrative of Taiwan folk song movement as student cultural production

Abstract

Scholars have concerned with the possibilities of the independent cultural production in the educational field. In the schools, the educated are surrounded by the powerful diverse cultural influences. Those have been discussed in different issues from sociological, anthropological and semiotic perspectives. In fact, there is a gap between theoretical and practical research in cultural studies. Therefore, it’s necessary to explore the production and educational significance of student culture from the perspective of specific culture event. This paper chooses Taiwan folk song movement as a specific Chinese cultural event occurred in the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. It can be named as “student soundscape” because it is created by the high school and the college students. The slogan of this movement “Sing Our Own Songs” was initially to question the students’ cultural dependency on western pop music and the stereotype of Chinese urban songs named as “Era Music”. It is the ordinary students who seek for a cultural turn- a new native art form with authentic common experience. With their humanism ideal and complicated affection, emphasized as “nostalgia”, this generation of youth have experienced a trip in search for cultural roots and developed a cultural renaissance age.

1 Introduction

One of the many facets of the modernity of education is the institutionalization of education, which has led to the narrowing of the Chinese and Western traditions of “cultivation” in the contemporary era, referring only to “school education.” The criticism educational scholars have pointed out that the curriculum content transmitted in the current school system is a “chosen result”. The educational culture of those “silent” people have been hidden in the space of school education, and even more “marginal” issues could not be discussed throughout the narrative and writing of educational history. Only some scholars have explored the cultural history of popular urban or rural popular culture with a broad meaning of “education” [1].

The concept of “elite culture” in education also affects the research paradigm of the student group in the academic community. For example, the sociological community’s narrative approach to youth culture and the use of theoretical tools to explain the underlying texture of cultural phenomena often adopt the discourse “youth” as “non-mature people” who need to be socialized through certain mechanisms and rituals. This means that youth are generally considered to be difficult to completely change the cultural lifestyle of adults, and they maintain a “resistance” or “free-floating” relationship with adults [2]. However, in fact, while revealing the reality, the discussion of such theoretical assumption and conclusion also obscures another aspect of youth culture, that is, in a specific historical context, the cultural creation and cultural life of youth are rich, multidimensional, and pioneering. Youth sound culture is often understood by cultural critics as a unique cultural expression of “adolescence”, which requires “more mature ways” of reflection, introspection, and deepening after students enter adult society. For example, in the popular music show “Band's Summer” in 2023, one of the Taiwanese bands “Constantine's Changing Ball” was criticized by live music critics for its theme and the emotional expression that fit the “characteristics of adolescence”, stating that “people need to settle down with age”. This argument is typical of equating “youth” with “youth culture”, which is the “manifestation of immature emotions” of youth during adolescence.¹Therefore, the researchers need to examine the educational implications of sound culture from a new perspective. As a wave of youth culture movement, it is also related to the vocalization of serious social issues and the internal exploration of people’s spiritual world, and forms a unique “soundscape” in the public space.

In the existing research on youth culture in the academic, the sound culture of students has not received widespread attention. Only a small number of related studies have involved how sound has become a medium for the formation and transmission of collective human memory, such as examining how sound museums inherit human cultural collective from the perspective of media studies [3]. The researches on the sound culture of Chinese local students from the interdisciplinary perspective of cultural history and education are relatively scarce. The exploration of the educational significance of the production and dissemination of sound culture is only limited exploration by a few scholars. This study responds to the emerging trend of “cultural study” in the academic and attempts to propose corresponding propositions in combination with the educational issues of young students. Specifically, this study chooses a specific cultural event as the topic from the historical perspective to narrate the Taiwan folk song movement, which has a profound influence on Chinese popular music and starts an era of “Renaissance in Taiwan music” [4], and summarizes the core concepts as the expression of youth culture.

The Chinese mainland has not attained too much about the folk song movement emerging in Taiwan in the 1970s until recent 30 years. Due to the lack of communication between the two sides at that time, there was a “time displacement” intersection. From the late 1980s, the “folk songs” had developed into mature industry, along with Taiwan’s newly emerging youth culture —— rock music, entered the cultural life of young people in the 1990s. They together with the song writing of the mainland students, formed a campus sound culture dominated by fresh tunes and pure lyrics of campus folk songs.

Zhang Zhaowei, a post-1960s cultural scholar in Taiwan, now a documentary director, is the earliest researcher to sort out the history of this folk song movement. In 1992, to accomplish for his master’s degree at the Graduate Institute of History at National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, he wrote and published his thesis——”Who is Singing Their Own Songs There? A History of the Development of Modern Folk Songs in Taiwan in the 1970s”. He divided the folk song movement into three threads: Chinese modern folk songs, Tamkang University-China Tide Magzine, and campus songs. This kind of historical clue sorting has been basically recognized by subsequent research, including Zhang Mengmeng’ s thesis for Capital Normal University master degree “Cultural Meaning of Folk Song Movement in Taiwan”. She has discussed three routes of contemporary folk songs’ lyric-writing, from the “sleeping awakening” to “holding high the banner” and then to “moving forward and apart with conflicts”. The types of folk songs could be categorized into “roots”, “poetry”, “ballad” and “reality” [5]. The other researches like Highway 61’s “Distant Homesickness”[6], Ma Shifang’s “Underground Homesickness Blues” [7], and Li Wan’s music reviews “Wind” [8], “Elegance” [9]and “Ode” [10] published in “Reading” magazine all follow this path. In the article “Folk Songs and the Public: The Left-wing Branch of Taiwan’s Modern Folk Song Movement in the 1970s”, Luo Manli makes detailed corrections to the development of these three lines [11]. Li Yitong describes the historical line of the folk song movement in Taiwan, and provides the mass culture perspective [12]. In literature study, Ji Xiaoyan focuses on the lyrics rich in “poetic” and humanistic connotations born in the “Taiwan Folk Song Movement” from 1975 to 1985, she emphasis the Taiwanese folk songs that should be placed in the field of modern Chinese poetry [13]. The above researches offer the basic history facts and the outline of the movement, however, it’s also important to discuss and narrate the crucial historical event from the perspective of education and culture study.

Zhang Zhaowei considers the movement as a process of searching for collective identity in that generation. The collective manifestation of beliefs and values is neither political nor economic [14]. The 30th anniversary concert of folk songs with the theme of “Forever’s Eternal Song” in 2005 attracted many young people. Zhang Zhaowei believes that the reason may be beyond the beauty of the songs and the starry lights of the singers, “but more because of a sense of ritual built by the years and values shared on stage and off stage—a sacredness that cannot be explained by political, commercial, and religious logic; this is precisely what these growing young hearts long for but cannot obtain” [15].For the young students in Taiwan who emerged from the pressure of the school entrance examination in the 1970s and entered the campus to begin their own independent development, folk songs were one of their forms of cultural practice and self-education. These “school folk singers” call themselves “singers” to distinguish themselves from the popular “stars”. In addition to a very small number of people from the popular music circle, the vast majority are campus students, creating a unique student sound culture-scape independent of Western popular music and Taiwanese popular music named “Era Music” in the spirit of amateurism. Its influence extends beyond the campus space and becomes a model for public education.

The generation of young people who listened to and sang folk songs has now become “middle-aged”; campus culture, which once created sound personality expression and shaped identity of young people, has gradually been destroyed by the ferocious popular culture industry and becomes part of mediocre pop culture. In the face of such a reality, it is necessary to conduct historical comparative research, that is, to return to the “pre-industrial stage” to investigate the youth’s culture production. It is not only to rediscover the “hidden” youth student culture in historical research, but also to consider the educational significance of youth culture: what is the significance of the culture created by young students in their growth process for themselves? How had these works been spread and formed the collective memory of that generation? What is the educational significance of their enlightenment journey compared to today’s reality?

2 Research design

2.1 Historical materials collection

The sources of historical materials in this paper are mainly as follows: First, the existing academic research on the history of folk songs, represented by Zhang Zhaowei, Ma Shifang, Highway 61, sorted out the whole process of Taiwan folk song movement. The second is the study of cultural history, including the drastic changes in Taiwan over the past half century. That time has brought about the spread of influential social trends and made the educational response to the demands of cultural change. Therefore, the historic researchers from literature, society, intellectuals and other fields have also paid attention to the important works in the Taiwanese folk song movement. The third is the record archives. Some of the works had ever not been opened for political reasons, but now is digital music industry era. Digital media websites such as NetEase Cloud Music provide most of the record open services. Fourth, many interviews and documentaries were filmed, so that the ideological portraits of some key figures could be recorded. For example, Hu Defu, Yang Zujun and others have maintained close ties with the media and academic circles in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland. Hu Defu is still active in the mainland music industry, cooperating with Phoenix.com to make humanities programs, and Yang Zujun has tracked many parties to record Li Shuangze.

2.2 Theoretical concepts

2.2.1 Culture production

Culture production has been discussed in many disciplines. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron develop an analysis of the reproduction of culture through education which is shown to play a key part in the reproduction of the whole social system [15]. Cheng Meng shows the cultural autonomy of those Chinese peasant children, and analyzes the creativity of the implied rules and their intrinsic relationship with cultural production. He also pays special attention to the dark side of such a cultural production. The impact of the class crossing journey of “the son does not inherit the father’s occupation” on the individual moral, emotional and cultural world has been narrated [16]. Wei Ran and Zhu Lili explain the relationship between mainland literature and Southeast Asian literature creation from the perspective of intersubjectivity. The collections are in the outline of cultural production to break nostalgia and establish identity [18].

2.2.2 Cultural resistance

Resistance in everyday life is of interest for academics and researchers of cultural psychology, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and human development [18]. Stuart Hall thinks that using “class-against-class” to understand “popular culture” is not proper, because there is no fixed content of the latter concept. The capacity to constitute classes and individuals as a popular force —— that is the nature of political and cultural struggle: to make the divided class and the separated peoples into a popular democratic cultural force. Hall also emphasizes Black music cultural meaning of resistance [19]. Nadine Dolby notices that youth culture research during the late 1980s and 1990s both expanded and questioned the notion of “resistance”. It was further complicated by theoretical moves within poststructuralism and postmodernism that weakened the grand narratives undergirding much of the Birmingham School research [20]. Jennifer Sandlin examines popular culture as a site of cultural resistance. Specifically, she explores how “culture jamming,” a cultural-resistance activity, can be a form of adult education [21].

2.2.3 Classicism

On modern Chinese literature, the academia involves the confrontation between Romanticism and Realism and the Modernist thought represented by Symbolism, but nothing about Classicism [22]. However, classicism of modern Chinese literature can be traced in 1920s, such as Wu Mi and Xue Heng school. Huang Haiqing reveals that the core of Yu Guangzhong’s poetics is the relation between tradition and modern. Yu’s system is constructed on the base of “modern poem”, but still blending with occidentalize and classical language. In other word, Yu’s poetic can be called “neoclassical poetic way”, which has its own profound and abundant connotation. In further analysis, the system of Yu’s neoclassical poetics includes not only literary research, but also some other artistic fields, such as fine arts and music [23].

2.2.4 Cultural populism

Cultural populists confront elite positions, such Michel de Certeau. He thinks of the daily practical activities as “tactics of daily resistance”, like talking, reading and purchasing. [24] The other representative of cultural populism, Paul Willis, explains “grounded aesthetics” to satisfy the need to eliminate the isolation of art and daily life. For him, culture is “common”, and the artists are also the “normal” people. [25] There is a vibrant symbolic life and creativity in everyday activity and expression. Willis spends so much time to describe the everyday culture of youth, reveals the extraordinary symbolic creativity of the ways in which people use, humanize, decorate, and invest with meaning their life spaces and social practices including music creation and consumption [26].

2.3 Narrative framework

This paper largely continues the historical narrative thread of the musical efforts of classical humanists and cultural populists in different directions, just like what Zhang Zhaowei’s dissertation emphasizes. Differently, this paper attempts to respond to the opposition between "elite" and “mass” (or “common”) in the field of cultural studies from the perspective of specific cultural events. At same time, we try to take them as the possibility of culture production and how the culture response to the social issues. In the narrative of the folk song movement, we use key words to summarize critical conclusions. Cultural resistance can be regarded as the cultural psychology of Taiwanese. Classicism and populism represent different forms of cultural production, till the 1980s witness cultural industry development. So many same-like pop songs had been criticized. Finally, the songs are compared with the music production under the new media and new cultural communication modes of contemporary times.

3 “Resisting westernization”: the rise of Taiwan modern folk song movement

The literature of Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s represents the awakening of “self-awareness”. The most influential thoughts were Chinese Cultural Revival Movement leaded by Kuomintang and the Debates Over Country Literature, which made the encounter between the traditional and the modern, the westernization and the Sinicization [27]. After the Kuomintang took control of Taiwan’s political power, there was a serious Westernization of politics, economy, culture, and even the educational sector. At that time, a popular saying —— “Come, come, come to Taiwan University; go, go, go to the United States”, reflected the basic trajectory of student education, as few overseas students returned to Taiwan. This phenomenon has also received attention in the mainland, and in the 1980s, there were articles discussing those trends of Taiwan young students. [28]Existentialism, as a pioneering Western modern trend of thought, surged into the campus and cultural circles, while in political philosophy, liberalism in the United States and Britain dominated. In the context of valuing personal freedom and spiritual experience, Taiwanese collectively exhibited “identity anxiety”. The cultural orientation of the 1960s focused on the inner spiritual world, and the “local” realism that emerged in the 1970s was the result of the development of two different paths, “introversion” and “extroversion”, under the reality of Taiwan's loss of cultural roots, erosion by foreign civilization and rapid economic expansion. There were endless cultural debates between the East and the West, the traditional and the modern. These two paths also gave rise to two different styles of cultural construction among students in the 1970s. Below, we will mainly describe the voices of two different styles of students according to the time line, which finally became two narrative modes of gender characteristics.

The slogan of the folk song movement, “sing our own song”, is generally believed to have first appeared in the “Coca-Cola” incident at Tamkang University with main event information in Table 1. On December 3 in 1976, Tamkang College of Arts and Sciences (now Tamkang University) held a “Western Folk Song Concert”, hosted by the well-known radio music program anchor Tao Xiaoqing, who later became known as the “Mother of Folk Songs” for her commitment to promoting folk song creation. At the concert, due to the temporary accident of the original singer Hu Defu, his friend and Tamkang Mathematics graduate Li Shuangze took his place. When it was his turn to perform, Li Shuangze asked the singer who had sung English songs before: “What is the feeling of a Chinese singing Western songs?” In response to the host’s question about “where is the modern folk song of China”, he replied, “Huang Chunming said in his ‘Local Suite’ that ‘before we are able to write our own songs, we should always sing the songs of our predecessors until we are able to write our own songs [29].” Apparently, he had pondered this question before. Subsequently, he sang several Taiwanese folk songs. This incident, also known as the “Tamkang Incident”, and its protagonist Li Shuangze, became a legend in Taiwan's cultural history. Hu Defu regardes Li Shuangze as the pioneer of a new era. In the documentary produced by Yang Zujun, he said, “If the era is a curtain that can be opened, I think Li Shuangze is the one who pulls the curtain” [30]. In 1976, Liang Jingfeng, then a teacher in the German Department of Tamkang University, recalled Li Shuangze and commented, “When he heard us singing, ‘What do you want to be a man?’ (in the song “Direction”) and he felt as if the time was going to change.“ [30] In the legend, the “big fat” Li Shuangze carried a guitar on his shoulder and hung a bottle of Coca-Cola on the head of the guitar, resembling a knight. Li Shuangze, who had just returned from studying abroad in the United States and Spain, said to the students and audience, “It is really exciting to return to my own land from abroad, but I am still drinking Coca-Cola…” Lv Qinwen was a student of the Department of Architecture of Tamkang University in 1975. He recalled Li Shuangze’s appearance at this folk concert, “Li questioned Tao Xiaoqing in person. He gave an example that everyone was a banana because the banana peel is yellow, and the heart is white. After such an admonition, and with a moment of embarrassment, he began to sing those songs again”. In Lv Qinwen’s opinion, “Tao Xiaoqing represents figures of Western song culture for that.” Cai Yurong was a student of the Department of Chemical Engineering of Tamkang Univeristy in 1974. He believes that Li Shuangze “is not targeting anyone for the phenomenon of sublime and flattering beauty in the entire Taiwanese campus atmosphere. If he is targeting anyone, it must be the students of Tamkang Univerisity. This is a starting point. It is the movement to understand oneself with songs, and it should be the real root on campus, so his credit is the credit of enlightenment” [30].

Table 1 “Coca-Cola” incident at Tamkang College of Arts and Sciences [32]

According to Li Wan’s speculation, maybe Li Shuangze should take a glass and make the Tamkang University Coca-Cola Incident [8]. Coca-Cola and American popular music are two major “symbols” of American popular culture, dominating the body and mind of young people around the world. This aggressive questioning and reflection caused a heated debate among campus. Zhou Yu was the founder of the Gengxin Experimental Theatre Troupe in the 1970s. When talked about the cultural wave of the 1970s, he emphasized, “it’s all of getting rid of the shackles of the old system. Everyone was looking for a way out within their own scope, pursuing freedom, pursuing personality, finding their own personality. The past was like a tight spell that restricts us” [30].

For Li Shuangze’s folk songs, his good friend Wang Zhenhua commented, “there is no doubt that Li Shuangze’s folk songs are greatly inspired by American folk songs and rock music. I have heard him sing Taiwanese and mainland folk songs, but his profound understanding of folk songs should come from Europe and America, or more accurately, from his own experience” [31]. Li Shuangze was the generation of Taiwanese who grew up independently under the “nationalist” education of the Kuomintang and the dilemma of foreign cultures from the United States. However, he noticed the voices of neglected ethnic groups and oppressed people from European and American folk songs and rock music. The media often referred to this type of folk singer as a “protest singer”, and Li Shuangze’s legend is about “smashing coke” to “protest” Western culture; the legend of Yang Zujun is as a “non-party person” (a more simplified classification is the Democratic Progressive Party) against the Kuomintang regime; Hu Defu is fighting for the rights of indigenous people. But in fact, Li Shuangze, Yang Zujun, and Hu Defu are not so much using singing as a tool for political propaganda as they are constructing cultural identity for their own identities. When recalled Li Shuangze, Wang Zhenhua reflected on the folk songs' meaning of “the author is the people”, “popularity is not folk songs”, “criticism is not folk songs”, and even that “art” and “folk songs” were opposites. Popular music is not the creation of the people, but a commercial consumer product produced in bulk by the industry. It blocks the public's voice of singing, and even caters to the emotional expression needs of the masses with vulgar cultural packaging. Folk songs are poems, which can “arouse, view, group and complain” as Confuse said, while popular songs are the emotional foam that dissipate individual willpower and rationality, which can only make the audience lose themselves—this is not the nutrient of young people’s growth, but misleading and abetting. Folk songs are not as refined as high-brow music. Li Shuangze said bluntly that he didn’t want to be an artist, although he also painted, wrote poem and songs (he graduated from the Department of Mathematics at Tamkang University and often attended lectures in the Department of Architecture). If art is the highest form of “civilization”, Li Shuangze chooses “culture” as a way to counter the “massification” of the technological world created by human rationality’s excessive processing. In a mechanized world, all young people are “the same type of person”- drinking Coca-Cola and consuming cultural industrial products brought about by the globalization of capital. (The tension between civilization and culture has been raised by Alfred Weber [32] and Cao Weidong [33].)

4 “Roots”: the wave of Taiwan modern folk song movement

The “Tamkang incident” was not an accidental event, and the transformation and reconstruction of popular culture was not “a castle in the air”. In the 1960s, the ivory-tower intellectuals already realized the value and urgency of collating folk songs. In 1966, musicologists Shi Weiliang, Xu Changhui, and Li Zheyang initiated the first “folk song collection movement” program after the war and established the “Chinese Folk Song Music Research Center”. In the next year, Xu Changhui and his colleagues discovered the famous country folk singer Chen Da, whose songs are recorded (in Table 2). Born during the Japanese occupation period, Chen Da learned to perform Yueqin from his elder brother as a child. Influenced by rural Taiwanese opera and folk rap art, he could not read and only speak the Southern Fujian dialect. When Xu Changhui saw him, he “lived alone in a house that was not fit for human habitation, without any relatives or friends, in a dark, impoverished and lonely world, living with a broken Yueqin”. Xu Changhui sighed, “When he picked up the Yueqin and sang the song that wanted to cry, I felt how real this world, this ‘red-eyed boy’ world that was forgotten by people in the metropolis, was!”[34] In addition to personally participating in the collection and adaptation of folk songs, Xu Changhui also wrote books and made contributions to the academic community, highlighting the value of Hengchun folk songs as a form of folk culture. Later, he also participated in local folk song and popular culture docking activities. Chen Da’s singing was not a formal “symbol of local culture”. He traveled around the countryside, singing short songs that advised young people to respect their parents, be frugal and hardworking, not to be conceited, and cherish love. He also sang about life experiences, lyrical tunes, and self-composed long narrative stories, telling stories about history and love between men and women. Before being discovered by academics, Chen Da was known as a “barefoot teacher” among the people [35].

Table 2 Chen Da’s folks song had been recorded publicly [36]

However, the influence of academic folklore research did not extend beyond the academia in the 1960s, and it was impossible for collectors to encourage all young people to engage in field research and collectively “sort out the ancient Chinese heritage”. In fact, it was not until the “folk song” became a popular cultural trend in the 1970s that the “hometown accent” of Chen Da spread to young people's ears and continued to be sung.

Among the popular music trends familiar to students, the first was the promotion of folk songs on the European and American pop music charts. In April 1971, Hong Xiaoqiao, a female singer, hosted the TV singing program “Golden Melody Awards” to promote folk-style Western songs, which achieved a great success. Before that, she also tried to sing the folk song “Donna Donna” (a Jewish folk song, which was popularized by the American folk singer Joan Baez in the 1960s. The Donna in the song is a woman who longs for freedom) at a “hot music concert” for teenagers who wanted to hear “hot songs”. At the concert, Hong Xiaoqiao failed miserably, and Li Shuangze helped her to strum the guitar and quietly left the stage through the sideway with the lively music on the stage… In this way, the trend of singing folk songs finally emerged in the early 1970s. Li Shuangze also met singers such as Hu Defu, Yang Xian, Wu Chuchu and some folk choirs in cafes, restaurants and other public places. From “hot songs” to “folk songs of other places”, then to “local folk songs”, this process was not so clear at the time, and the pioneer Li Shuangze's exploration was not so smooth.

In the winter of 1974, Li Shuangze prepared to work together to make and sing own songs in order to help Hu Defu organize a folk concert. They gathered in a restaurant, where it was raining in a winter night. Someone was singing “The Night Rain in the Port City”——”The young men, they don’t know where they are going”. “The Night Rain in the Port City” was originally called “The Blues of the Rain”, which was a famous song created by Yang Sanlang, a pioneer in Taiwan’s folk music industry in 1951. The song is filled with desolation and confusion, which is also the voice of every generation of depressed youth. In this situation, Li Shuangze asked himself, “it’s sad and shameful that our generation can’t sing songs in our own language.” Hu Defu sang two sentences of “Fishers, swim and swim…” and then sighed sadly —— “I just can't!” Young people who have already developed self-awareness could only lament that “our generation can't sing songs in our own language” [36].

Later, Li Shuangze went abroad to hold an art exhibition and pursue further study. While he left Taiwan to roam in various folk countries, Yang Xian, a domestic folk comrade, sang the rhyme of homesickness in the classical culture context.

5 “Where is homesickness”: classical humanism in Taiwan folk song movement

In 1974, Hu Defu invited Yang Xian as a guest to sing “Four Rhymes of Homesickness” at his folk song concert. Yang Xian was a graduate student in the Department of Biology at Taiwan University and had just stayed on to teach at the graduate school. During his campus years, he learned guitar playing and composition in the spare time, and then composed the poetry collection “White Jade and Bitter Gourd” of Yu Guangzhong into songs. He collaborated with several students at Taiwan University to produce and perform. Yu Guangzhong also attended the concert, and after listening to “Four Rhymes of Homesickness”, he admired it very much and wrote eight more poems. They were added together to perform at the “Concert of Modern Folk Songs” held at Zhongshan Hall in June of the following year, and were quickly published as “Collection of Modern Folk Songs in China” (in Table 3). The source of “folk songs” in the “Modern Folk Song Movement” is thus—even though it later triggered dissatisfaction from the academia, who believed that these songs were neither “modern” nor “folk songs” in the sense of folklore. Despite the controversy, the momentum of the “Folk Song Movement” was preserved and gained a foothold in the overall cultural circle. Yang Xian also gained the status of “Father of Modern Folk Songs in Taiwan”. The concert invited some people from the literary and music media, including Yu Guangzhong, Tao Xiaoqing, and newspaper reporters and columnists. The responses were very good, and later the folk song community also regarded this concert as the beginning of the “Year of Folk Songs”. The “ Forever’s Eternal Song—Folk Song Carnival” in 2005 was based on the 30th anniversary calculated in 1975. In June 2015, a 40th anniversary concert with the theme of “To sing a Sixiangqi Again” was held in Taipei.

Table 3 Yang Xian released two classicism folk song abulms

When emphasizing the significance of this concert, later generations often consciously eliminate the voices of opponents of the “movement”. At that time, not only did the academicians have doubts about these works with the name of “modern folk song”, but ordinary audiences also did not fully accept them. According to Li Shuangze’s record, as early as 1974, at the concert of Hu Defu, when Yang Xian began to sing “Give me a pail of Yangtze River water”, someone under the stage scolded, “The Yangtze River water is round or flat, you know nothing!” Of course, Yang Xian did not know whether the Yangtze River water was “round or flat”—in fact, no young people who were born in the post-war “baby boom” in Taiwan had ever seen the Yangtze River water. The “Yangtze River” was nothing but the imagination of young people about the mainland on the other sea side, the ancient Chinese geographical space and cultural space.

The lyricist Yu Guangzhong and the composer Yang Xian are two generations with a great age difference, but they are both in a similar state of “anxiety of influence” which originally refers to the psychologyin literature and now we use to describe the psychologyof cultural subjectivity [37]. The two have created a new common “inner space” that attracts many “wandering souls” who live in “foreign lands”, especially elite intellectuals in Taiwan’s cultural circle. After they transferred from the overall westernization, they turned to the Chinese traditional culture—the “traditional culture” here is naturally the classical world of Chinese scholars. Therefore, Yu Guangzhong and Yang Xian’s “homesickness” and “Chinese complex” are essentially the aesthetic empathy of elite intellectuals towards Chinese history and culture. Whether it is the “Rondo” expressing personal emotions, or the “Hengchun Seaside” and “Westward Passing Yangguan” looking out to the vast land of the north and south, all are exquisitely crafted works that are extremely concerned with “literary” and “musical” qualities. They are completely different from the context of Li Shuangze, Hu Defu, and Yang Zujun, and have been opposed by the latter, especially Li Shuangze. Li Shuangze abandoned Yang Xian’s use of bel canto singing and complex instrumental arrangements (such as symphonic orchestration, string, piano, and jazz drum configurations), which are incompatible with the simplicity of popular singing and writing. In his own creation, Li Shuangze only used simple accompaniment instruments such as guitar, harmonica, and folk instrument Yueqin.

Yang Xian admitted in an interview that his creative approach “represented the aspirations and aesthetic of intellectuals at that time”. “Although I am from an agricultural college and have worked in the fields, you cannot experience some of the most basic things in Taiwan. We are not in the same circle, and their circle has their composers and singers. However, after all, intellectuals are the backbone of society, so we cannot be silent. Most students in the cultural circle prefer their own things, and we just need some resonance. As long as we can sing what we like, that’s fine”[38]. His reflection after 30 years shows the basic attitude of a student group that existed as elite intellectuals in university campuses and later integrated into the middle class. Before students made the voice of “singing their own songs”, most middle-class adults refused the local “mimi sound” (Era Music), and they could still choose elegant music and Western popular music. Like Yang Xian, campus students who received elite humanistic education since childhood would neither appreciate nor create the culture of the people at the bottom.

In 1977, Yang Xian released his second album “Westward Passing Yangguan” (in Table 3), and after two “temporary departure” concerts, he went abroad to study. Later, he switched careers to become a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, opened a clinic, and did import and export of drugs. At the height of his career, he left Taiwan’s music scene, without turning his “amateur” into “profession”. Yang Xian has always been firmly opposed to using music as a career because of his love for music. During this short music career, he believes that music, like other “events of life “, “is just an experience. My life still needs other different experiences to be complete.”[39]

Judging from Yang Xian's musical career and later life trajectory, art is not a self-contained world for him. Another “experience mode” (Michael Oakeshott's term [42])—religion—is the true home of his soul.

In the United States, Yang Xian lived a tranquil life without music and devoted himself to the infinite religious world. He grew up in a Christian educational preschool after losing his father as a child, but he was a Buddhist. Yang Xian also met his spiritual partner Ding Naijun, as well as Ding Naijun’s sister Ding Naizhu and brother-in-law Lai Shengchua in the United States. He and Ding Naijun practiced together, occasionally meeting, talking, and translating spiritual books until Ding Naijun died of cancer in 2003.

Yang Xian’s contribution to Taiwan's music industry cannot be ignored, but in addition to building the significance of Yang Xian and his works from a professional perspective of music history, we can also listen to Yang Xian's “voice” from the perspective of education: why did Yang Xian sing his own songs in his youth? What is the significance of “singing his own songs” for his growth? After the awakening of self-awareness among this generation of young people, in order to solve the inevitable life dilemma they face, some of them turned to literature, some devoted themselves to historical research, some were keen on politics, and after the political movement, they turned to academic careers. Economist Qu Wanwen currently as a professor at the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Center of Taiwan's “Academia Sinica”, came to NTU in the early 1970s after graduating from Taiwan's Taipei First Girls High School. “For a young woman who is sensitive to her own growth, coming to NTU is a physical and mental liberation” [43]. “Being introspective” and “facing reality” are the common contradictory psychology of this generation of intellectual youth. Yang Xian realized the “loneliness of human” very early, and said he was “a lonely person”. His introverted personality caused him not to try to face external reality and seek his own foundation by facing the earth and the people like Li Shuangze, who is full of vigor and vitality and eager to try in various fields.” According to people who have seen Yang Xian, he is gentle and gentle, always with a calm and indifferent look” [44].

6 “Rooted”: populism in the Taiwan folk song movement

Where does the answer come from? When asking the questions on the campus of Tamkang University, Li Shuangze already had a vague answer. The process of finding the answer is certainly not like the one his former idol mentor Bob Dylan sang in the famous folk song “ blowing in the wind”—”The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…” Li Shuangze, who never caught the “answer” in the wind, stared at Dylan’s photo in front of the Folk Village coffee house in Greenwich Village, New York, the headquarters of counterculture, until he met the girl coming towards him:

“Do you know Bob Dylan?

I don’t know. Who is he?

Ah! Do you know a singer named Woody Guthrie?”

“Aha! I know, I like him, my father likes him, and my grandfather likes him too; listen, this is your land, this is my land, from California to the island of New York, from the waters of the Golden Stream to the redwood forest, this land was originally opened up for us!”

Whether this is Li Shuangze’s true experience or a story he made up, it indicates the emergence of a new spiritual journey stage: young people who listened to the music of the British and the American protest singers The Beatles and Dylan in the 1950s and 1960s and gained initial enlightenment, full of passion, were instead moved by an ordinary old folk singer, Woody Guthrie. He recalled the lullabies his mother sang when he was a child:

The baby is sleepy, and grows one inch every time it sleeps.

The baby is reluctant to leave, and grows a foot every night.

When the sun sets, I hold my baby in my arms carefully and look at it.

My son is my heart and soul. I'm worried about him catching cold.

The lullabies have constructed childhood memories abandoned behind the years, or are the maternal voices that accompany people’s lives and emerge when an individual’s existence is obscured for too long? Like the ballads (narrative folk songs) sung by Hengchun elderly Chen Da with an old Yueqin, the lullabies are entrusted with the hope of maintaining cultural ties.

The above text of Li Shuangze is quoted from the article “Where Did the Song Come From?” [45] At the end of the article, he added that the purpose of writing this article was not only to commemorate the folk music concert at Tamkang University, but also to “tell those who follow us that we have tried hard to walk down a 'wrong' path” [45].

Li Shuangze is not walking alone on this “wrong” path. During his half-year abroad, the old and the young generations of Chinese “country ballads” emerged. On March 31, 1977, Tamkang held a “Night Concert of Chinese Folk Songs” inviting Chen Da, and young generation campus singers Yang Zujun, Wu Chuchu, Tamkang's student choir, including Fengyao Chorus and Tamkang Chorus, as well as teachers from the school and some outsiders. Unlike the indoor concert held by Yang Xian 2 years ago, this concert was an outdoor performance, like the “Ballad Night” concerts commonly seen on university campuses today, where people “sit on the ground” and “stand up and sing” in an open space. The repertoire of the performance included original folk songs, mountain ballads, children’s songs, pop songs, etc., and was not limited to the “folk songs” recognized by the academy. (The main setlist was in Table 4) However, from a historical perspective, the significance of this performance should lie on highlighting the rap narrative ballads of Chen Da. Although from the perspective of the performance at that time, Chen Da was not popular among campus students who were more accustomed to Western pop music, and even some boys laid down on the ground impatiently and began to chat; but Chen Da entered the university campus from the folk world, guiding college students to see the world outside the campus, and also promoting the “modern folk song” path opened up by Yang Xian closer to folk music.

Table 4 Tamkang held the “Night Concert of Chinese Folk Songs”

The reason why Li Shuangze can make a voice different from the academism and ordinary literati in the campus also lies in the campus culture. Since the” Diaoyu Movement” and the dismissal of 13 teachers from the philosophy department, the liberal teachers and students in NTU had been basically expelled. While in Tamkang Univeristy, there was still a left-wing cultural atmosphere. These two concerts have received great attention and reports from campus publications “Tamkang Weekly” and “China Tide”. The magazine “China Tide” was originally a comprehensive publication, edited by Su Qingli until the third issue. Later, with the assistance of Chen Yingzhen, they created the famous magazine “ China Tide “—the most prominent left-wing cultural-social force in Taiwan since the mid-1970s, and gathered different people, such as Wang Xiaobo, Chen Guying, Lin Zaijue, Jiang Xun, Wang Jinping, Yang Kui, etc. China Tide advocated a realistic literary style and actively intervened in the local literature debate in 1977. The magazines began to explore and organize the literary works of Japanese colonial period writers. The magazine articles were written about the history of the peasant and worker movements during the Japanese colonial period, the petition movement for parliamentary establishment, analyzing political and economic issues, and attempting to link Taiwan’s anti-Japanese resistance to China’s national revolution: both were anti-imperialist revolutions. China Tide also reported and commented on real-life social issues such as labor, industrial pollution, gambling, farmers, prostitution, fishermen, the indigenous, and the Jade Reservoir issue. “[47] Tamkang Weekly has published several articles in a row, discussing the dispute between Chinese and Western cultures behind the “singing our own songs” at the 1975 concert. The newly established China Tide directly participated in the 1977 concert and organized an academic discussion to explore the creative source of folk songs. Just like Yang Xian’s “modern folk song” had been widely recognized and spread in the intellectual and cultural circles, the Tamkang campus tried to expand the influence scope for the voice of civilians. The campus cultural tradition of Tamkang University was later inherited by Lin Shengxiang, a student major in traffic management who entered the campus in the 1990s. He sang rock in Hakka dialect, gave up rock singing folk songs, and used music to participate in the “anti-eservoir movement”, focusing on the situation of laborers migrating from rural areas to cities.

7 “Inheritance”: the standard-bearer in the Taiwan folk song movement

Unfortunately, Li Shuangze, who had great ambitions, had too little time to create and sing his own songs. From the early summer of 1977 to September, he created 10 songs (also said to be 11 or 12), including “ Old Drummer” (in Fig. 1, Li Shuangze’s handwriting of the lyric of the song “Old Drummer” has been kept), “I Know”, “Our Morning”, “Beautiful Island”, “Young China”, “Heart Song”, “Hong Mao City”, “Direction”, “Yugong Moves Mountains “, and “Farewell Song”. Apart from Li Shuangze and his friend and poet Liang Jingfeng, the lyrics were all adapted from poems by poets such as Jiang Xun and Chen Xiuxi. For example, the song “Direction” uses a simple soundtrack, a simple melody like folk songs, and plain lyrics like “What kind of person should we be? We should be free people. What kind of song should we sing? We should sing innocent songs” [48].After Li Shuangze’s death, Yang Zujun and the others recorded his works and published album “Respect! Li Shuangze Sings His Own Song”, in which the songs were full of the personality——honest and upright.

Fig. 1

Li Shuangze’s handwriting as the lyric of the song “Old Drummer”——”Ours songs are the flame of the youth, are the chorus of the harvest” [49]

Li Shuangze drowned while saving a swimmer before he could publish his works. After his accident, Hu Defu and Yang Zujun sang those songs on various occasions. Later, Hu Defu added a section of “Formosa, beautiful Formosa “to the song “Formosa”, which is the version “Beautiful Island” circulated today. Two highly popular works——” Beautiful Island “ and “Young China”, are included in Yang Zujun's album released by Synco Cultural Corporation in 1978. Although this album is a true “folk song” creation album that conveys the voice of the local land and the people in the history of the folk song movement, it had been banned by the authorities due to Yang Zujun’s active participation in social movements, and the album was fully recalled 2 months after its release. “Beautiful Island” was later used as the name of a non-party publication and was banned for a long time; “Young China” also suffered the same fate due to its “longing for reunification”. In Yang Zujun’s main works released publicly, those songs are full of national complexes (the main setlist is provide in Table 5). After the 1990s, Taiwan’s local consciousness was extremely inflated, and “Beautiful Island” was used as a tool for “Taiwan independence” ideological indoctrination. However, in Li Shuangze’s memorial album “Beautiful Island “ and “Young China” are sung together, so how can they “represent” two diametrically opposed political positions?

Table 5 Yang Zujun’s main works released publicly

Li Shuangze’s influence on Yang Zujun can be described as a “mentor who changed the trajectory of her life”. Yang Zujun was a student in the English Department of Tamkang University. She grew up with Western music and sang Western songs in college. After the “Coca-Cola incident”, Li Shuangze’s questioning shook Yang Zujun’s mind. This young girl began to think about the value of individuals in that “great era” in her singing—”When I was in my early 20 s, I was always thinking that: If singing is not for the purpose of being able to bear some national, state, and social significance in that great era, then what is the purpose of singing? And my life has been in this kind of rigid national thinking, through ups and downs, joy, reflection, but I can’t find sufficient reasons for myself to rely on and grasp the first half of my life. I can’t figure out the sophistication and refinement of the adult world, which is probably my biggest problem to date. Even at nearly 50 years old, I still can’t figure it out and can’t do it!” [53].

After Li Shuangze’s death, she not only sang folk songs, but also shed her schoolgirl's inexperience and reserve, and held a “Green Grassland Ballad Charity Concert” for child prostitutes (most of Taiwan’s child prostitutes at that time were the daughters of indigenous peoples). She invited Wu Chuchu, Native Sound Quartet and other folk singers to perform for free. The repertoire included Taiwanese traditional folk song “Dark Night”), classical poetry adaptation “Song of Goodness”, as well as “Beautiful Island”, “Old Drummer” and so on. The concert received widespread attention from the society and consciously penetrated the bottom and working class. Up to now, Yang Zujun has maintained a sense of justice and protested the unfairness of reality, and has not been deeply involved in the political whirlpool.

Like Yang Zujun, Hu Defu has attended many concerts but has not released many albums in total. He is a Puyuma who grew up in the Dagu Mountain area of Pingtung, Taiwan. His mother is from the Paiwan ethnic group. At that time, school education forced uniform Mandarin teaching inside and outside the classroom, weakening the influence of the indigenous culture of “ethnic minorities”. After entering university, Hu Defu worked part-time in a coffee shop and sang English songs until he met Li Shuangze. Only then was he inspired to try singing the song “Beautiful Rice” passed down by his ancestors. Later, he created works such as “The Child on the Cow’s Back” and “In A Flash” (his works are in Table 6). Even after the “folk song” situation officially opened in 1977, Hu Defu did not participate in the production activities of the music industry, but worked with Yang Zujun to protect the rights of indigenous children who were sold to cities as prostitutes. After Yang Zujun was banned from singing, Hu Defu also gave up the rich life he should have enjoyed after the newly resurgent popular culture industry, and focused his energy on protecting the rights of indigenous people. After the folk song movement declined in the 1980s, Hu Defu continued to collect indigenous songs and preserve the culture of his own ethnic people.

Table 6 Hu Defu’s most influential works released publicly

It wasn’t until 2005 that Hu Defu released his first album——”In A Flash”. The album cover said: “The soul of sound, the journey home” [54]. This “odyssey home” allowed him to grow from a “stuttering” teenager who never dared to sing to one who could now sing to young people living in cities. In the interview, Hu Defu reminded—— “Let them know that although we have entered many doors in the distant past, we still have to go back and knock on our own door.” “Folk songs themselves are a way for a nation or a group of people to express their opinions and voices, whether it is an attitude towards politics, or an appeal for their own survival and development conditions, or a demand for basic dignity, whether it is a black folk song or our song, we can see the traces of our speech. That's all that matters” [56]. In those years, Li Shuangze shouted, “Sing our own song”, allowing young people in a culturally barren era to write and sing their own songs. Now, nearly 40 years after Li Shuangze’s death, the folk song movement has long been washed away by economic trends and become a memory of the previous generation. Will the sound with spiritual power ring out again? Hu Defu said, “I still think that everyone should play the role of Li Shuangze and be responsible for folk music. We should continue to create an environment and stage for later generations to continue to write such songs, to gather, and to continue to convey such voices. This is what I want to do now. At this age, I also want to be with young people. I want to be another Li Shuangze” [56, 57].

8 “Aftermath”: the contemporary significance of Taiwan’s folk song movement

However, as reminded above, the initiators of folk songs made the call for “singing their own songs”. But they did not put on a posture of “protest”. Contrary to that, the singers have not all participated in the operation of the music industry. From this point of view, Luo Dayou and the “pretended naïve” campus folk songs he criticized were imprisoned in the thriving cultural industry in the 1980s. Both them became different types of goods deliberately produced to cater to the different consumer tastes of the public. Jiang Xun whose poet “writing to the hometown” had been adopt as Li Shuangze’s “Young China” said the folk songs were natural and belonged to the tradition of The Shi King [57]. Hu Defu’s campus teacher Yu Guangzhong named the folk song as “new folk” in 1975 [58]. However, after the commercial intervention of young students, “campus folk songs” became the content and object of consumption. At that time, Li Shuangze’s deafening cry—”sing our own song” became a cultural fantasy of idealists. To this day, many domestic TV programs aim at young students as consumer groups, such as “Happy Boys” and “Chinese Good Songs”. They are not only fill students' culturally hungry appetites with commercial products packaged as “young people’s own voices”, but also destroy the future of youth cultural practice. The young students are of poor culture dream to be singers, such as folk singers, rock stars, and electronic music divas. They eager to make a living from music with their “talents”. However, they have not realized that this is getting farther and farther away from singing as a life. The new generation of independent musicians, represented by mainland folk singer Zhao Lei, do not blindly follow the market, but have successfully created highly influential works. He has caused people to think about a series of aesthetic issues, such as “good life” and “sincere emotion”. Those are related to the richness and sound development of young people's lifestyles and educational lives.

Finally, returning to the question raised at the beginning of this article. The Taiwan school folk song movement has laid the foundation for popular culture, especially pop music, both in Taiwan and mainland China. Now it is hard to imagine what form today’s popular culture, especially youth culture, would have taken without the Taiwan school folk song movement. In the folk song movement, youth culture has shaped the national cultural identity and emotional cohesion of the Taiwanese public and the mainland people, which is especially obvious in the narrative style of Taiwanese campus folk songs.

The narrative of the texts of the school folk song movement includes not only lyrics, but also poems, movies and novels. The folk song movement’s relationship with poems has already attracted the attention of the current academic community, especially literature researcher. In some movies, such as the movie “Special Smile”, they describe the singing scenes of female folk singers; and the emotional tone of the film has a light sense of melancholy. The movie narrative is often related to the emotional life of intellectual women, we think it can be regarded as a “affection revolution”² in modern female’s culture production. Another film,” Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? “, is also about female folk singers. In contrast, it is more intense than “Special Smile”. The film reveals the exploitative nature of musicians under the mechanism of cultural industry, and the original healthy family life of female folk singers is torn apart by capitalism. On novels, taking Luo Dayou’s song “Orphan of Asia” as an example, it is from Wu Zhuoliu’s novel of the same name. This novel and the lyric examine the tragic history of the colonization of the Taiwan island. The different narrative texts construct common main melody of social transformation. (The information of the movie and songs setlist is provide in Table 7.)

Table 7 two representative films are in the context of narrative on the folk songs

However, it’s meaningful to notice that the topics and emotional tone are different among the folk songs as the Table 8’s clarification. The most interesting fact is: in the narratives of these texts, there can be a common deep emotional accumulation– nostalgia. It should be noted that around “nostalgia”, there are differences in gender dimensions. The male singers focus more on the “migration history” of the Chinese nation being invaded, that is, the “trauma narrative” of intellectuals, like “The People of Tangshan”, “ Love to China”, “Beautiful Island”, “Yueqin”, etc. Among those, “The Descendants of the Dragon” is the representative. It narrates the many tribulations and traumas encountered by the Chinese nation in modern history, thus condensing the sense of national identity of the Chinese descendants. At the same time, in addition to left-wing intellectuals such as Yang Zujun expressing dissatisfaction with the rule of the Kuomintang and sympathy for the toiling masses, some campus students have created a large number of “female wandering ballads”. This kind of narrating is more consistent with the characteristics of contemporary female independent music in 21 century, among which Hong Xiaoqiao, Qi Yu, Xu Jingchun, Pan Yueyun, female writer Sanmao and other creators are representatives, expressing their yearning for freedom of “distance” just like in the song “Olive “. With the transition in society, the momentum of Taiwan's school folk song movement has gradually weakened, and the expression of emotions in cultural production has become more and more multi-dimensional. Still, the “traumatic narrative” characteristics of rock music and independent pop music have been retained, and diversified musical motives such as criticism of urbanization, of commercial society, of environmental destruction, and speaking out for women's independence have gradually developed. On the surface, the school folk song movement is just a special historical event, but its gestation, development and growth are of great value for thinking about contemporary youth culture: young people are not the consumer of pop culture (just as many youth culture studies tend to think), but also the creators and re-producer of emerging culture. In the process of students sound culture development, they shape the historical memory and a new cultural identity of young people to the nation-state in a national nihilism time, and leaded a for-coming gender liberation movement.

Table 8 Diverse narrative themes in the folk song movement