Love my homeland since childhood…

People love their homeland through every page of books, I love my homeland through every old song...

In the past, there were songs written about the beautiful homeland on every kilometer. But today, the homeland has changed on every centimeter, so people sometimes consider the old homeland music to be Démoder, and if it still exists, it only exists in the minds of… the elderly!

Music written about the homeland during the war is the pride of not only those who love music, "songs of war" will be "intangible culture" in the Vietnamese musical heritage of peace .

I would like to "flip before the lamp" one or two songs written about the homeland among the thousands of songs written by many musicians during the war, which still remain in peace and in people's hearts...

Musician Truc Phuong, “the lonely musician” (Lonely in a positive sense). He did not compose with anyone, he did not set anyone’s poems to music, and his music only had “afternoon” and “evening”. He lived for a long time in Binh Tuy, now La Gi – Binh Thuan , he considered Binh Thuan his second homeland.

I have written quite a lot of Truc Phuong’s songs: Fate, love, life’s ways… the harshness of war. Musician Truc Phuong, it seems like he just stood “by life” waiting for the afternoon to fall and the night to come. And life has brought him many ups and downs, breakups, breakups… and it is these “impermanent” things that have given him the material to write “normal” songs.

Writing about him, I accidentally forgot him, the musician who “loved his homeland since childhood”… There are two songs written about his homeland, which are not inferior to any homeland songs of his contemporaries: “Love of the homeland” and “Afternoon in my village”.

I don't know which of these two songs he wrote first, but sooner or later it was a song of "love for the homeland" since he was a musician, living in "The Habits of Life" (the name of his song).

“Love and affection for the countryside” (Gamme Dm, Mambo Boléro): “… Passionate love penetrates through thatched roofs/ Sweetly scents green hair/ The passionate loves are simple loves/ My hometown is still beautiful, beautiful with innocent loves/ The afternoon in the countryside is intoxicated with songs/ The villagers love the rice flowers passionately/ The old mothers sit and watch the children playing in the neighborhood below/ Their lips quiver with laughter like when they were in their twenties…/ The afternoon falls on the dike and I hear someone’s voice/ A date is made for a happy love affair between boys and girls/ The singing is lost in the moonlight/ The countryside night is bustling with the sound of the pestle being released…”.

The lyrics have such beautiful words: "The sweetest loves are simple loves", "The villagers love the rice flowers passionately", "The old mother's lips tremble with laughter like when she was in her twenties", "The late afternoon falls on the dike, I hear someone's voice"...

“Afternoon in my village” (Gamme A, Rumba): “… My hometown has pale yellow sunlight in a lonely village/ A few white clouds drift to the end of the sky/ The sound of a call passes through the deserted hamlet/ The blue smoke of the afternoon seems to want to stop time/ One afternoon you just arrived/ The coconut trees' shadows lean in the wind, lulling the porch/ Looking for their colorful wings/ My eyes look and say a thousand words…/ Oh, remember to visit the old village/ To hear the sweet sound of the coconut trees' shadows lulling/…”.

Again, the words are so gentle, so graceful, so beautiful that they are bewildered… Truc Phuong uses words to talk about “Afternoon in my village”: “Pale yellow of the lonely village”, “A few white clouds drifting”, “Blue smoke of the afternoon stops time”, “The leaning coconut shade”, “The sweet sound lulls the coconut shade”, “Your eyes look and say a thousand words”… Those images are hard to forget even though today “the countryside has turned into the city” and the way of thinking and living has changed to make up for the years of poverty and suffering due to war.

In the old days, there was a time when Thanh Thuy's voice and Truc Phuong's songs were so famous that people asked: Did Truc Phuong's music make Thanh Thuy famous, or did Thanh Thuy make Truc Phuong's music? And Dr. Jason Gibbs, an American who came to Vietnam to study Bolero music, said: Truc Phuong's music and singer Thanh Thuy's singing are the best!

I also love singer Thanh Thuy singing Truc Phuong's music. And I have also listened to singer Hong Truc singing Truc Phuong's music quite strangely. But I was startled when I heard singer Ngoc Anh (who was very energetic in the Red music: Light up my village) sing "Chieu lang em". Ngoc Anh pronounced one or two words "dật dờ" in "Vải Mây trắng dật dờ về cưi troi", hearing "dật dờ" I kept imagining the white clouds drifting, drifting... And for me, it's hard to find any singer better than Ngoc Anh when singing "Chieu lang em" including Thanh Thuy?

Two songs written about the homeland by Truc Phuong are truly love songs for “the once glorious homeland”. Singing them again, listening to them again, to see the image of the homeland, even though it is lost, far away…

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