Southerners celebrate cai luong heritage

It seemed that nearly everyone in the southern province of Bac Lieu was watching the show last Tuesday evening dedicated to one cai luong song – whether they were in attendance at the convention centre or at home in front of their TV sets.
The cai luong (reformed theatre) song, composed by Cao Van Lau, a tai tu musician and a native of the province, turns 90 years old last week.
The event marks the beginning of a five-day Cao Van Lau Festival which wrapped on Saturday in the province.
Dubbed Da Co Hoai Lang (Hearing Drumbeats on a Silent night), the song is about a wife who misses her husband deeply.
It is a lamentation that Lau composed on behalf of his wife who was forced to part from him by his mother for not giving birth to a child.
The song was later called vong co (hearing the drum from afar) and made its way straight to cai luong as the key song of the theatre, without which cai luong is empty, as aficionados are often heard to say.
"It has been deeply imprinted in the hearts and souls of every southerner," said Nguyen Hong Phuong, deputy chairwoman of the province’s people’s committee and chief coordinator of the festival.
In fact, it is widely believed it is one of the most successful songs in the country’s music history, "an immortal song which has not ceased spreading among the community for the last 90 years," Phuong said.
Phuong said the song and its vong co progenies had been a prime entertainment for the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta’s population, whether they are working or having fun, and whether they are cheerful or sorrowful.
"Everyone here can sing it, more or less," she said.
The passion for the song was evident during the show, with thousands of spectators ranging from elderly on crutches to students and children in attendance, in the presence of the province’s top leadership, leaders from other delta provinces and the officials from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
Most of them stood for hours until the last minute of the show, even though strong winds were blowing in from the nearby sea.
On the stage, the story of how Da Co Hoai Lang was born was re-enacted by Cao Van Lau Troupe’s artists.
Lau’s bottled-up agony after many days missing his wife finally exploded into a song that expressed melancholy in both its lyrics and melody.
It quickly won over the public and other musicians, who added other rhythms of the song to develop it into the musical frame as it is today.
That frame acts as a basis for composers to write different lyrics to produce a repertoire of thousands of vong co songs.
The development from the original form was demonstrated by guest artists who took turns to perform successive forms of vong co one after another.
"It is even more melancholy than all the melancholy songs in tai tu music," noted singer Bach Hue, 76, one of the senior custodians of the art form, with more than 60 years of performances.
"Everyone can sing it properly, but few can sing it beautifully," she said, adding that it was hard to perform the subtle feelings conveyed by the song.
"You should know where to stress a note or hold a note longer," she explained.
Thanh Hoa, a guest northern singer who performed a vong co song in a southern accent, said she was enthralled immediately the first time she heard vong co.
Since then, she has tried very hard to forge a southern singing accent.
"I’ve been in love with vong co all my life," said Nguyen Minh Nguyet, 77, former deputy chairman of the province, adding that the music was a source of consolation to him and to most southerners when they moved to the north more than 50 years ago.
"It is so fascinating, so every time I heard a tune, I felt happy and proud of my home province," she said.
Tran Ngoc Son, 44, a native driver of the province, said he chose to sing Da Co Hoai Lang every time he went to karaoke.
"It is very profound and touches your feelings deeply," he said.
The song typifies the way a southerner turns to melancholy music to express feelings from the bottom of their hearts, said Nguyen Hoang Trieu, a folklore enthusiast who travelled from HCM City to the province to take part in the festival.
He admitted that the song held him spellbound.
"We feel a profound nostalgia," said Vietnamese-French Vu Thi Kim Oanh of how vong co affects her and her compatriots abroad.
Songwriter Vu Duc Sao Bien, whose was inspired by Cao Van Lau’s Da Co Hoai Lang, said the song was "a pearl that Lau left to following generations forever".
During the festival, a museum dedicated to Lau opened yesterday, October 5, next to the tombs of Lau and his wife in the provincial capital of Bac Lieu Town.
The museum houses relics, pictures and manuscripts of Lau and of people in cai luong circles as a whole, chronicling his biography and the development of Da Co Hoai Lang.
An altar, on which a bust of Lau stands, is placed in the middle of the room, where fans can pay respect to him as the tunes of vong co songs resound in the museum.