First Records Releases Chinese Folk Music Series

Source: Reassembling the Memory Puzzle of the “Folk Song Collection Movement”
From: Country Road Magazine, DECEMBER Vol.39 no.04, pp. 5–7
Date: April 2013Author: Lee Chih-ming

Looking back to that era when campus folk songs were just emerging, field recording albums categorized as “folk music” and “traditional music” may not have found commercial success on the market, yet they arrived at just the right moment to spark a “search for roots” consciousness in a segment of the public, and planted deep within a whole generation of young intellectuals the seeds of an idea — “singing our own songs.” Of all the recordings from that era, I believe the most comprehensive and diverse in capturing the full range of different postwar ethnic and musical traditions, and the most directly influential on Taiwanese popular music’s local creative practitioners, were undoubtedly the Chinese Folk and Ethnic Music Collection series LP (vinyl) records — published between 1979 and 1985 by the veteran “First Records” label, planned by the “Chinese Folk Arts Foundation” founded at the initiative of Hsu Tsang-houei.

In just five short years, “First Records” consecutively released twenty-one albums, their contents covering nearly all of the most precious fieldwork findings jointly documented by the many participants in Taiwan’s postwar “folk song collection movement” of the 1960s through the late 1970s.Chinese Folk and Ethnic Music Collection, Vol. 1: Chen Ta and Hengchun Melody Narrative Singing. First Records, 1979.

Tags

External Links

• Hakka’s Theater of “Tea-Picking” (Hsu Fang-yuan’s Blog)
• Sunday Happiness and Three Mr. Chens (Tom’s Blog)
• Performing Arts Library / Hsu Tsang-houei (Performing Arts Library)