ABSTRACT
Having briefly surveyed the traditional contexts of the Shaanbei bards, let us now place them in a firmer temporal frame. Apart from written accounts, I rely on oral history, looking at the bards’ fortunes under various phases of Communism – since some of the region was a Communist base-area from 1936, by the late 1990s there were few who could remember an earlier period. The Party’s cultural programme in the 1940s certainly affected narrative-singing, and at first it may look as if new contexts and repertories simply replaced old ones, but we will soon see how misleading this impression would be. Put simply, the risk is to assume that if one new thing happens, then all the old things stop happening. The commune system only imposed severe restrictions from 1956, and even then there was some local latitude until 1965; bards seem to have been more independent of political control than some other more public musicians such as shawm bands (discussed in Part Three).
