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A reference in a Zhang Chengzhi 张承志 essay made me look up Wang Luobin 王洛宾: "conveyor of songs" 传歌者, famous for adapting ethnic minority tunes for majority audiences. He spent most of '49-'79 doing hard labor in Xinjiang, then possibly became San Mao's final lover.
He studied music in Beijing, then went west, forming an anti-Japanese propaganda troupe indirectly supported by the 8th Route Army. He even ended up Yan'an for a short time. He was writing songs to support the war effort, and he started adapting folk songs, too.
"Girl from Dabancheng" 达坂城的姑娘 was an early success. Lots of people were adapting or recording folk music. His focus on ethnic songs was perhaps somewhat unique. This documentary covers how he wrote it and a later trip to the titular town to see pretty girls.
Wang was locked up in Qinghai in the '40s on suspicion of being a red, got freed by Ma Bufang, and made out okay after '49, putting his name to "Salaam Chairman Mao" 萨拉姆毛主席. His past was regarded with suspicion. He was arrested in '52, then 1960, then again in 1965...
For most of '65 to '75, he was making bricks in an Urumqi prison. He was released without being rehabilitated or assigned work, leaving him homeless for a time. He was finally rehabilitated in 1981. That was also when he was rediscovered. There was Wang Luobin fever.
He sort of became a living legend, I guess, subject of books and documentaries and TV series, a symbol of the reform era, even . This is Kelimu 克里木 singing "Girl from Dabancheng" at the '87 Spring Festival Gala.
San Mao made two pilgrimages to see Wang Luobin in Xinjiang. It's been described as her "final romance." I'm not sure whether that's true or not. I think they might have just been very romantic people. But that was his level of fame, that he could get San Mao on a flight.
There was already some criticism of Wang Luobin at the time (see: "Wang Luobin: Folk Song King of the Northwest or Song Thief? Copyright, Representation, and Chinese Folk Songs" by Rachel Harris, which I quoted from above), but it was muted at first, mostly academic...
It got less academic when he challenged Taiwanese singer Luo Dayou 罗大佑 over royalties for cover versions of his songs. This might have come from a misunderstanding of copyright in China in the '80s and '90s, but it opened him up for more criticism.
Rachel Harris's paper gets into the Universal Copyright Convention in China, how folk songs adapted for red songs were treated... but the bigger issue was Xinjiang identity "exoticized, distanced" and "mediated by Han Chinese voices," rather than controlled by indigenous artists.
I'd argue Wang Luobin was a fairly small part of that system, he never said anything particularly provocative about his own work, and, on a certain level, he must have just been happy to get out of making bricks in an Urumqi prison. He died in 1996.
Paul Robeson sang it, it was sent to space... But, from when the General Secretary had to sing, here's Hu Jintao doing "In That Faraway Place" 在那遥远的地方, one of Wang Luobin's most famous songs, cobbled together from Kazakh, Tibetan, and Uighur folk songs around 1939.
And, sorry... There's a clip missing above, where he explains composing "Dabancheng" and goes to see the pretty girls of Dabancheng... This is from a documentary available on Youtube, called Wang Luobin and His Western Folk Songs 王洛宾和他的西部民歌:
