The folk songs of northern Shaanxi are commonly known locally as "mountain songs" or "acid songs". It can be divided into the form of albatross, ditty, labor horn, song and dance, custom song and religious song. Albatrosses and ditties are the most common. "Albatross" is the most characteristic folk song in northern Shaanxi, and she constructs the main body of northern Shaanxi folk songs. The tunes are long and high-spirited, rough and unrestrained, with beautiful rhythms. Its content mostly reflects love, marriage, daily life, resistance to oppression, and freedom as the theme.
Shaanxi North, located on the Loess Plateau, is characterized by mountain after mountain, ditch after ditch. The people living here work and plow in the mountains, and the animal drivers have ambiguities with the local women in their lodging, accommodation, and stores, and they walk on the treacherous mountain roads and deep gullies. In the heavy and monotonous life, one in order to dispel the heart's sorrow and loneliness, exudes loneliness, masturbation and amusement. Secondly, they recalled their families, relatives and friends, and lovers, so they saw the scene and sent their feelings to the scene. Singing songs, with a high and long voice to express their feelings, feelings, tell their love and the pursuit of a better life, to release the pent-up frustration and sorrow in the heart.
Shaanbei albatross belongs to the folk songs in the mountain song body, is the old society lower class working people laboring in the mountains between the gullies chanting a kind of mountain song. It is also the people of northern Shaanxi Province in the "men go outside the mouth, women digging bitter vegetables," the tragic and miserable life of fate, life's clamor. Therefore, some places call it "mountain song", "climbing the mountain tune". And because a large part of it is singing the colorful emotional thoughts between men and women, it is also called "sour song".
Xintianyou is the Loess Plateau's most characteristic, long-lived folk songs, its colorful tunes, all-encompassing content, very much loved by the majority of working people. The folk in northern Shaanxi Province said, "Albatross is not broken, broken head, the poor can not solve the sadness". There is more "Xintianyou like no Liangzi bucket, when to sing when what time to say", it can be seen, Xintianyou and the northern Shaanxi people is the bloodline, inseparable.
Shaanxi albatross format is a two-sentence paragraph, the application of poetry, "the other than this thing also" and "the first thing to say it to cause the words of the chorus also". (Zhu Xi's "Poetry Collection Biography") of the picaresque technique, often on the sentence rise, the next line singing the content of the body, the two reflect each other into an indivisible unity, listening to the breathtaking, such as Yang Guan three stacks, the aftermath of the sound around the beams unceasingly.
The content of the Shaanbei albatross is nothing more than the love and praise for the hometown, the desire and pursuit of a better life, as well as the chanting of the feelings between men and women "cut and cut, and also messy" and other kinds of feelings.
Shaanxi people live in the ditches and round hills and rounds of the rolling loess plateau, drinking the Yellow River grew up, they are as simple as the loess, like the Yellow River as deep and tall. Despite the face of this wide variety of thin harvest, "nine droughts in ten years," the bleak landscape, but the people of northern Shaanxi Province still love the yellow earth of the birth of Yi.