Fengyang Flower Drum

The story

"Fengyang Flower Drum" is a traditional Chinese folk song from Fengyang County in Anhui Province, developed during the late Ming dynasty. It belongs to the speech-song (shuochang) arts of Quyi.

In the late Ming period Fengyang County suffered a disastrous series of floods and droughts; the county was prone to flooding from the Yellow River. Many of its people were forced to sing for money, and the song came to be associated with beggars from Fengyang. It was performed in public for gratuities, originally by two seated women singers, usually sisters-in-law.

The form became widely known outside China through the 1937 film The Good Earth, adapted from Pearl S. Buck's novel, in which it appears. The composer Chou Wen-chung, who had emigrated from China to the United States, used it in his composition Landscapes of 1949.

What it says

A song of people driven from their homes by flood and drought, performed in the streets to earn a living. It carries the hardship of a ruined county into a public performance for passers-by.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.