EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 30 - Xẩm
Genre of the Day - Xẩm
Album of the Day - Xẩm chợ by Hà Thị Cầu (1999)
May 30, 2024
Let this post be a resounding call to support your local buskers with a smile or a dollar. Simply standing there for a sustained moment and appreciating their music could make their day. The art of the wandering troubadour playing music for passers-by in a transitory midst, weaving between trams or busily shopping along a plaza, is an underappreciated tradition. It’s a global endeavor, and learning about buskers throughout the world illuminates lessons about music at the margins and its life-affirming power.
Xẩm is our first Vietnamese genre visitor on this column, and it’s got a mystical story to boot if those stacked accents didn’t already catch your eye. Xam is said to have originated under semi-divine circumstances in the 1200s. Trần Quốc Đĩnh, the son of a king, was blinded at the hands of a competitive brother in a fit of rage. Having escaped to a forest, despondent and alone, he fell into a deep sleep. The Buddha appeared, taught him the craft of a few necessary instruments (most importantly, a bowed violin with two strings), and blessed him with the gift of xẩm. As he spread his songs through the countryside, xẩm’s beauty circled back to the palace that had abandoned him. They welcomed him back as the court performer. This story cemented xẩm’s beloved status in Vietnamese folklore and musical fabric. It took musical influence from other Vietnamese folk genres, but its distinctiveness lies in its performance in small groups, trademark two-string violin, clacking bamboo castanets and drums, and emotive lyrics.
From that point onwards, xẩm was familiarly known as the music of traveling blind bard buskers. (I apologize for the abundant alliteration.) Through songs that reflected the wide spectrum of life’s grandeurs and minutia through Vietnamese history from epic folktales to salacious, satirical ditties, xẩm allowed people who otherwise could not access much work opportunity in historical Vietnam not just a profession, but a respected place in society. It’s often suggested that blind people have a special connection to music, given how the lack of vision enhances one’s aural senses. Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and Andrea Boccelli are three excellent musicians often cited as examples of this phenomenon. The quantified truth is that blind musicians are actually much better at discriminating pitch, perhaps indicating a propensity for well-constructed music, but that this only applies to those who went blind before the age of two. It’s worth noting that blind musicians shouldn’t be reduced to mere beat-the-obstacles, motivation-fodder platitudes, but respected and treated with the same respect for craft as sighted musicians. That being said, xẩm’s significance lies in the insight it provides to the correlation between blindness and historical opportunity through music.
As Vietnamese society was shaken by colonization, buffeted by years of civil war, and transformed via economic liberalization in the past two hundred years, xẩm gradually became a lost art. Though it’s been revived in performance settings by dedicated singers, its defining characteristic as a street style of singing has receded into the past. One of xẩm’s last singers was one of its best, though, and Hà Thị Cầu became a Vietnamese folk hero as she continued to sing into her 70s and 80s. Though she was not blind, her father was, and xẩm was a family affair: she came from a lineage of three generations. Having inherited a prolific body of musical tradition as she went from town to town singing and scraping by with her parents, she held those memories tightly and could recite and play an astounding 400 xẩm songs.
This album took me back to the vagaries of YouTube rather than Spotify, which I usually prefer for playlisting purposes, but it’s worth it for Ms. Hà Thị Cầu. The sparse space provided by the instrumentation, with the rapid, freewheeling melodic changes derived from the violin’s two-string setup, gives room for the most important aspect of xẩm: her voice and the lyrics. Her malleable voice is made for storytelling, brimming with energetic force such as at the 47 minute mark. Though in her early seventies at the time of this album’s release, she hardly sounds world-weary; her delivery remains widely expressive and assertive. Emotional content likely lies more in the lyrics, for which I could unfortunately not locate a translation, but I infer from the lack of clear mood differentiation in her delivery that she’s not living out these xẩms as much as working as a storyteller does best: from a thoughtful distance. She sustains an undying commitment to a centuries-old tradition that gave a platform to people who otherwise might have languished at society’s margins. It’s a reminder to appreciate our nomadic musicians the next time we cross paths.