Yosutu, Gada Meiren

Abstract

Gada Meiren is a narrative song about a local hero who fought against Chinese warlord’s cultivation of pastureland. These two verses are most popularly sung all over Inner Mongolia instead of singing whole narrative song nowadays. In this collection, there are 40 video recordings of Horchin Mongolian songs made during fieldwork in 2010 and 2011 respectively. The collection contains songs by bards and amateur singers as well as ordinary people. Although most of them are narrative songs, only a few of them are sung in the proper manner as they were in the past. Most of them are sung in fractions. There are also interviews about local knowledge of the narrative songs, the historical facts the songs are based on, the song characters, the occasions the songs are sung, different people’s attitudes towards the different style of singing, their ideas about the present endangered state of the songs, their longing to and difficulty of maintaining the tradition etc.