Arirang folk songs, the original improvisational rap music of Korean people

Arirang songs have always evoked powerful emotions and often spontaneous shoulder dance moves among Koreans, at home or abroad.

Arirang is a genre of Korean indigenous music featuring heart-wrenching laments of tragedy, hardship, suffering and injustice. Arirang's improvisational nature enables anyone to easily weave their own such poignant life stories in song, like modern day rap.

Life has always been tough for ordinary Koreans, especially in remote areas. Poverty, hard labor, and abrupt political change combined to produce what Koreans call Ae-hwan which means sadness and joy. In Korean folk music DNA, Arirang is known to express those laments in songs.

The Arirang mountain pass was an omnipresent historical influence for this folk music tradition, giving its name. Korea is a land dominated by imposing mountain ranges, some impassable, isolating the villages and cities in provinces from each other. "Arirang Gogae" literally means the Arirang mountain pass. All Arirang songs feature the Arirang Gogae.

The act of climbing through a difficult mountain pass is symbolic of painful life transitions. For example, consider the 1392 story of feared militia leader Yi Seong-gye of Hamheung. He led his private army on a long journey to Gaegyeong, the ancient capital of the Goryeo Dynasty, and overthrew the rulers there in a bloody mutiny.

Goryeo officials who survived were forced to walk out of one of 26 gates of Gaegyeong city walls - which connected all known roads to the waning empire - never to look back. Several loyal former Goryeo government officials traveled through mountain passes all the way back to Jeongseon county in Gangwon Province. There, they sang Arirang, lamenting the fate of Bulsa-yigun, which means not serving more than one lord.

Researchers have identified thousands of variations of Arirang songs. One of the more well-known Arirang variations is performed in Gangwon Province. These memorialize King Danjong (1441 - 1457) of Joseon Dynasty whose short reign and tragic life ended when his uncle exiled him to die in Yeongwol, Gangwon Province.

Jeongseon Arirang "needs to be sung from the guts, only then the sounds of the sorrows of a quiet life come out from the bones and the land," said Kim Nam-ki, 85, the Jeongseon Arirang maestro who performed the Arirang at the opening ceremony of the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games.

"Despite taking the ginseng and the deer antlers daily to avoid growing old, what is this wretched rough gray hair on my head! Ah, Ah!" sings the 85-year old Kim, the Jeongseon Arirang maestro.

Jeongseon has many Arirang songs about the dangerous old ways of harvesting and transporting Korean pine lumber to market. This highly-sought wood was used to build royal palaces and Hanok, the traditional Korean houses. Historically, it came from the Taebaek Mountains in Gangwon Province, where ancient groves grew plentifully in the high ridges.

Transporting this wood prior to trucking in the 1970s was dangerous work. The insatiable demand for the lumber in the capital city Seoul enticed people with the rare opportunity of lucrative work. The preferred lumber superhighway used the Dong Gang (East) River that flows downstream to the Han River in Seoul.

Seductive barmaids in Seoul eyed the newly-wealthy country men who struck it rich. But there were also tragedies.

At times of high water, the men of rural Jeongseon would jump on Timber Rafts and transport pine logs from the Taebaek Mountains downstream to Seoul. One Arirang song related the tragic death of a young man who never returned from a Timber Raft trip and his girlfriend who longed for his return. She jumped into the river to drown and join her boyfriend in the afterlife.

This song has been memorialized with the statues of a young man and a maiden, standing on opposite sides along the banks of the Dong Gang river, next to the Jeongseon Arirang Training Center. This location was the traditional starting point of the Timber Rafts departing for Seoul.

The song gets performed in Jeongseon County's Arirang Center, on each day of the month ending in 2 and 7. The performances coincide with Jeongseon open market called 5-il-jang.

Arirang music and songs can trigger powerful visceral and emotional reactions in people. Some people are immediately attracted to Arirang upon hearing it.

Foreign visitors to Korea in the 19th century such as Homer Bezaleel Hulbert (1863 - 1949) noted that "Singing Arirang is like rice to Koreans. Koreans sing because they love to sing."

Hulbert, who was an American missionary, journalist and political activist, advocated for the independence of Korea from Japanese colonial rule. Hulbert was a close personal friend and advisor to Emperor Gojong, and taught English to Syngman Rhee, the future first President of the Republic of Korea.

Arirang songs have spread far beyond the Korean homeland. Koreans abroad who suffered tragedy carried the tradition with them. Arirang music was even found in prisoners of war in Germany where two Korean men who were captured fighting under the Soviet flag, were indeed Arirang singing Koreans.

Koreans in the Soviet Union who suffered greatly under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1937 mass relocation, are still singing Arirang songs.

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Koreans from the Russian Far East were forcibly shipped like packs of animals to uninhabited Central Asia plains which is the modern day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the middle of nowhere. Tens of thousands did not survive the unheated train ride covering some 6,400 km from home, and subsequent winter where people had to dig holes in the ground to survive the elements, in an area with no infrastructure.

Arirang, as a genre uniquely able to lament life's sufferings, became a part of the Korea experience for United Nations soldiers fighting in the Korean War.

A vintage 1951 Arirang Scarf made during the Korean War has Korean Arirang song on sheet music with romanization of the Arirang lyrics.

A RI RANG A RIRANG A RA RI YO - -
A RI RIANG KOGERO NEO-MO KANDA
NA - LUL BEO LEEGO KA SI-NAN NIM - UN
SIM NI TO MOKKA-SEO BALL BEONG NAN DA.

"Who would know about my bitter and painful heart aches? That is the Arirang Gogae, the sorrows and laments of life" said Mr. Kim Nam-ki, the Jeongseon Arirang Maestro.

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