Abstract
Folk songs are the valuable cultural storehouse of a people or an ethnic group, because the original life styles, thoughts, view of marriage and love of a people all find their expressions in folk songs. Folk songs have been trying to tell the rise and decline of its cultures and its peoples in their own ways. They began to come into being almost from the time when the people or the ethnic group formed. Home is an eternal topic in most folk songs. Homesick songs make up a premier category of Horqin folk songs. The image of home is also indispensable in American cowboy songs. This paper tries to build a bridge between two seemingly distant cultures by comparing the image of home in Mongolian Horqin lyric folk songs with that in American western cowboy songs. Both of these folk songs are trying to present the real stories of authentic people as their topics even if some rhetorical devices are employed sometimes in order to show more vivid characters. Characters in both songs are lonely. The spiritual and physical loneliness of the characters in both songs is so much alike. But the dissimilarities are more obvious. The different historical and cultural backgrounds and the distinct geographical and social environment of two folk songs are the best explanation to these dissimilarities.
Highlights
Folk songs are traditional songs of a people or an ethnic group
Folk songs are the valuable cultural storehouse of a people or an ethnic group, because the original life styles, thoughts, view of marriage and love of a people all find their expressions in folk songs
Homesick songs make up a premier category of Horqin folk songs
Summary
Folk songs are traditional songs of a people or an ethnic group. They are passed down usually orally from one generation to another, from one group of people to another. With no very clear authorized writers for most songs, folk songs tend directly to express the simple emotions of people. This artistic form tends to carry the memories of the whole group. Most folk songs may take shape in the process of labor while the singers try to relieve themselves of the labor. People’s ways of life, common value, customs, traditions, thoughts all find their expressions in folk songs. There is not an exception to both Mongolian Horqin lyric folk songs and American cowboy songs
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