The Tujia mainly live in the two Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefectures of western Hunan and western Hubei, with a few scattered in Youyang, Xiushan, Shizhu, Qianjiang in Sichuan Province, and Wufeng, Changyang and other counties in the Yichang area of Hubei Province. The population is 2,832,743 (1982 statistics). The Tujia language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language group of the Sino-Tibetan language family, and the Chinese characters are commonly used. Only a few remote cottages in the counties of Baojing, Longshan, and Yingshun in western Hunan and Laifeng in western Hubei have retained the Tujia language. The Tujia people love songs and dances, and the first and third months of the lunar calendar are the traditional song and dance festivals "Sheba Day". Folk music is mainly composed of folk songs and instrumental music.
Folk songs According to the traditional habits of the Tujia people can be divided into five kinds of songs, mountain songs, gripping grass gongs and drums, labor horns, shaking children's songs and children's songs, custom songs. Mountain Songs There are two kinds of Tujia mountain songs in language: Tujia mountain songs and Chinese mountain songs; there are two kinds of vocal cadences: high cadence and flat cadence; and there are two kinds of structures: "one voice", "three voices", "four sentences", "four lines", "four lines", and "four lines". In terms of structure, there are "one tone", "three tones", "four lines" and "five lines"; in terms of content, there are love songs, ancient songs, ritual songs, life songs and bitter love songs. During the period of the Land Revolution, a large number of revolutionary songs were produced in the western Hunan E region, which played a positive role in the struggle. The four lines of the song, also known as the "four lines of the head", is a more common mountain song. The lyrics are seven words and four lines, hence the name. The Tujia four-sentence songs in Hunan's Longshan and Yongshun counties are characterized by a wide range of tones, with many gradations and thirds of tones. See the following examples: In addition, the Yanhe and Potou songs popular in Baojing County, the Lota songs of Longshan County, and the Maoba songs of Hefeng Taiping in western Hubei all belong to the four-verse mountain songs. The five-sentence song is made up of a repetitive upper and lower sentence with a changeable sentence inserted in the middle. There are two kinds of structures: one is the five-sentence song popular in Baoding, Yongshun and Sangzhi, in which the changeable sentence is inserted between two and three lines; the other is the five-sentence song popular in the remote mountain villages of Sangzhi, in which the changeable sentence is inserted between three and four lines, which is a special and distinctive method. It is mainly popular in the western region of Hubei. It is inserted in the middle of a number of five-word phrases from the front to the back. The number of words is regular, and the song is sung in a series of eight phrases. The tone is coherent and compact. The form of the song is vivid and lively, and the content mostly expresses love. It is sung by one or more people with high cadences and the lyrics are fixed. Wearing song, also known as wearing horn, wearing five lines, is a kind of high-cavity mountain song with a more complicated structure. It consists of "No. 1" (a four-stanza mountain song) and "No. 2" (a five-stanza mountain song), with "No. 2" being led by the singer and "No. 3" being sung by the crowd. "The song is led by the singer and the horn is sung by the crowd. The singing is characterized by singing the "horn" first and then the "song", and then inserting the first, second and fourth lines of the "horn" into the "five lines of song" respectively. The song is sung in the "five lines of the song".
Weeding gongs and drums are also known as weeding songs, chorus gongs and drums, and digging songs. In the collective grass-gathering, field-cultivation or digging, two or four people sing in front of the labor team by sounding gongs and beating drums. There are 3 types of gripping songs. Section Song: Popular in western Hunan counties. The basic tune consists of an upper and lower phrase, which is rich in recitation: two-part song: popular in Yongshun and Heping area. Two-part song: popular in Yongshun and Heping areas. It consists of two sections with different tunes and rhythms. The first section is introduced by gongs and drums, and the melody is high and melodious, with a free rhythm and decorative melody; in the Yangge section, the rhythm is bright and strong, and the tune is similar to the grass-gathering song of the foot of the Longshan slope. A set of folk songs: Usually composed of 5 or 6 songs to more than 20 songs. The set of songs in the northeast of Sangzhi has 24 songs with names such as "Yellow Flowers Bloom by the Roadside", "A Tree of Fresh Flowers", and "The Sun is on the Top". The Weed Song is sung by a leader, a group of four singers and four singers each singing one line. Accompanying instruments are as little as one gong and one drum, and as much as one gong, two suona, etc. The labor songs of the Tujia people are sung in the same way as the labor songs of the Tujia people. Labor Horns The Tujia people live in the Wuling Mountains and on both sides of the Youshui and the Li River. Dragging wood and transporting materials, prying rocks and lifting stones, and rowing boats and sailing them play an important role in their labor life, and thus rowing boats, dragging wood, and rockwork are the most popular. Boating horn is mainly popular in the Youshui, river basin, there are soup oar horn, sculling horn, pulling the fiber horn and so on. If the Youshui sculling horn is led by one person, the main melody is easy and melodious, with ups and downs, and the crowd sings along with the "Cough Ha" or "Cough Cough ﹑ Ha" with an interval of four degrees, and the tunes are complicated and simple, with prominent melody and a strong flavor of life. Drag wood bugle is most representative of the Yongshun County Chief's village. It is divided into four kinds of trumpets: two-tone, three-tone, four-tone and indirect. The three-tone bugle is named because the leader and chorus sing three different tunes, with a steady rhythm and strong melody, while the four-tone bugle has only eight bars, and the leader and chorus each have four different tunes, hence its name. It has a high pitch and a short, strong rhythm, and is used at the critical moment of dragging wood. The rockworker's bugle is most representative of those popular in Guzhang County and Longshan County. In Guzhang County, there are two kinds of rockworkers' horns: three and five. Longshan County has 8 kinds of the number, each with a special name, such as "feed the number", "feed the sheep number", "pike sheep number" and so on. In the area of Longshan in western Hubei and western Hunan, it is also common to popularize the song composed of several to more than 20 folk songs. For example, Lichuan stone worker's horn is composed of 12 tunes, such as "Daliulang", "Point Red", "Begonia", "A flower" and so on. The song is composed of 12 tunes.
Shaking children's songs and children's songs The shaking children's songs sung in Tujia language are popular in Pofu of Longshan and Pushu of Baojing, the tunes are composed of the upper and lower phrases and the rhythms are smooth. In Puxu County, there are two kinds of children's songs: the feather tone and the levy tone, and the melody goes downward in steps. The song of Mudong in Laichang County is similar to that of Longshan County and is sung in Chinese. Children like to sing children's songs when they are having fun and grazing. One kind of children's songs sung in Chinese is developed on the basis of nursery rhymes and has a single tone, mostly in two voices; another kind of children's songs is sung in the Tujia language and has the same tunes as those of the Tujia piping music, "dong dong.
There are four kinds of customary songs: "Crying for Marriage": The Tujia people have always had the custom of "singing for mourning and crying for marriage". On the eve of a girl's marriage, she sings a song about crying for marriage, which consists of a long musical phrase with a downward progression, and the end of the phrase is a six- or seven-degree jump upward with the sound of weeping, and is sung repeatedly with weeping. The weeping marriage song of Mudong in Laichang County has a strong melody, regular rhythm, and a gentle and deep feeling. The lyrics of the song are mostly 7 words and 1 line, with two lines and a paragraph, and they are characterized by rhyming. There are two kinds of songs: one sung by the bride and the other sung by two people, also known as "sister crying". The bride sings first, and the weeping companion inserts herself at the end of the sentence, forming two voices naturally, which is a kind of folk polyphonic song rarely seen in Tujia folk songs. Song of Filial Piety: According to the custom of the Tujia people, the night before the burial of an old man after his death, someone should be invited to sing a song of filial piety accompanied by drums, also known as "playing the funeral drums" and "playing the night drums and gongs"; there are two forms of this song: sitting around the table in front of the sacrificial tent and walking around the coffin. There are two forms of singing: sitting around the table in front of the sacrificial tent and walking around the coffin. Songs and drums vary from place to place, and the contents are basically the same, such as the "Twenty-four Filial Piety Traditions", "Pregnancy in October", and the life of the deceased, etc., which are made up as they are sung. In Lichuan County, there is a kind of filial piety song with eight lines, also known as "bright seven and dark eight", i.e., only seven words are sung in each line, and the eighth word is hidden, and the tune is in the form of upper and lower lines, with the upper line falling on the feather tone and the lower line falling on the levitation tone. The funeral drum dance of Exi has developed into a song and dance activity, which is sung by a singer who leads the song by beating the drum, with the help of two people who sing and dance at the same time. Pendulum Song: The Tujia people have to dance and sing the pendulum song during large-scale rituals. The content of the Song of the Pendulum is wide-ranging, including the migration and settlement of ethnic groups, self-defense against the enemy, and the opening up of farmland for production. Songs and tunes vary from place to place, with Yongshun County having a one-sentence style, Longshan County having an up-and-down style, and Baojing County having a free style. In addition, there is a kind of chanting free style popular in all counties. Tima Songs: "Tima" is also known as "Tulaosi", a religious professional. Tima song is used in religious activities to drive away ghosts and evil spirits, and is sung by Tima when he invites the gods. He sings and dances while shaking a brass bell with one hand and dancing with a sword with the other. Baoding's "Touring God Tune", "Dry Dragon Boat Tune", and "Sending the Son Lady Tune" all belong to this kind of songs.