And quiet flows the Yangtze. Borrowing the idea of a contemporary best seller it is amazing how quietly the Yangtze flows through the noisy channels of song. With the possible exception of Li Tai-po, the drunken bard of the Tang dynasty, who became '50 enamoured of the river that he fell in it one night and was drowned trying to embrace the moon, the mighty Yangtze _has been sadly neglected by songsters. Did she bisect any other country but China, her beauties, her per~ versities, her sorrows, and her dangers' would be immortalized and a goodly number of inhabitants, to judge by the example of the Mississippi, would be receiving either world sympathy or appear~ ing in high-salaried theatre or cinema productions. But here we have this mighty river, tearing its way through 3,000 miles of rocky highlands and fertile plains, leaving its terrible flood line, like an autograph of vengeance high up along the rocks and dykes, left ignored. Its uncontrollable limits and the woes of its inhabitants, which form theme songs for Tin Pon Alleyway writers of the Mississippi are mentioned only statistically in flood relief reports. In sharp contrast, everybody knows everything. there is to know about the Mississippi. It is "Old Man River—" "it doesn't plant taters or cotton"—Mit just keeps rolling along" has levees ore which gally-dressed darkies dance and sing"—people are forever asking it to stay away from their doors, and it has produced a picturesque race who are either mournfully lugubrious with shaded Ughts and sad, plaintive hymns, or very cheerful with rolling eyes, large mouths and restless feet, But the Yangtze—well a long, yellow river with junks and sampans going nowhere.
This should be remedied. Tin Pan Alley should be informed of this new field of musical material, The very idea lies in these boats, -calgge small hosts to be encounter-everywhere and apparently going nowhere. This is one of the great mysteries of the Yangtze, a fit theme for a rich, full-voiced song, ending on note of longing as the boat and the chords disappear into nothingness. Along its long course these small boats are to be met, manned by two or three People, with no objective in view but just drifting with the current or flapping along in the wind. They seem to head for nowhere in "particular and the more desolate the river bank the more often are they to be seen. If they get anywhere at all it must take days and if they carry any cargo, beyond the crew, it must be well-concealed, As the river bank rolls past the speedy steamer revealing nothing human beyond fan occasional mud hut or a tiny village somewhere on the horizon there is always one of these tiny boats to be seen. Perhaps it is the limelesiness of the East which possible, a detachment from ime res such boats and voy:
mediate' and material objectives which cultivates such an indefiniteness of purpose. But what field for the song writer. Armed with a rhyming dictionary and a general knowledge of the pointlessness of modern songs here is 8 suggestion to put the Yangtze on the lips of the world:
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.