Singing on the River: Sichuan Boatmen and Their Work Songs, 1880s–1930s

Abstract

Singing on the River is the first monographic study in English of the song culture and living conditions of a little-known subgroup in China, the men who propelled timber junks through the treacherous rapids of the upper Yangzi River until the emergence of modern means of boat transport in the earlyto mid-twentieth century. Chabrowski offers an unparalleled picture of the daily life of these men, who scaled sheer cliffs and toiled painfully along winding tracks cut high into the rock face, hauling the junks with pulleys by sheer physical strength. The songs they sang, known as work chants of the Sichuan Rivers or chuanjiang haozi 川江號子, captured the imagination of successive generations of literati during the imperial era and numerous Western observers from the mid nineteenth century. The singers of these songs are now for the most part deceased and the song culture built around boat tracking in the upper reaches of the Yangzi was in sharp decline by 1937, finally coming to an end in the early years of the reform era (late 1970s). For this reason Chabrowski did not interview singers and collect songs in living transmission. In this regard, his scholarly project differs from that of other specialists in Chinese song who have had the opportunity to conduct ethnographic studies of song traditions still in active performance in the late twentieth century and beyond. Chabrowski relies on a corpus of song scripts collected for the most part in the 1980s from Eastern Sichuan, in the region of Chongqing. Specifically, his haozi come from the Zhongguo geyao jicheng Chongqing shi juan 中國歌謠集成 重慶市卷 (Chinese song compendium Chongqing city volume; 1989) and another volume entitled Chuanjiang haozi 川江號子 (Work chants of the Sichuan rivers; 2007). The song collections of the reform era, valuable as they are as omnibus compendiums of local traditions, were produced with the aim of conserving what was considered to be the highlights of the genre and to bolster regional pride. The government-sponsored collections aimed to present otherwise obscure oral traditions in a written form palatable to contemporary readers. This could involve partial collection procedures and even a degree of bowdlerization of material considered “obscene” or too vulgar (as noted by Chabrowski, p. 35). In the twenty-first century, decades after the song tradition of the Sichuan boatmen has disappeared, reliance on this type of corpus presents considerable methodological challenges. Chabrowski’s general response to these difficulties is to corroborate thematic material he discerns in the songs with what can be established from a range of historic, social, economic and cultural sources. He also