Explore the Mesmerizing Art of Hmong Song Poetry
Bee Yang, my father, the song poet, accepts the Sally Award for Initiative, given by the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. Bee Yang was born in the high mountains of Laos in the break of the Laotian Civil War and grew up during America’s Secret War in Laos. As a child, he sat at […]
Login to your account
Stay up to date with upcoming events or special announcements. Sign up for my personal newsletter.
Thaum Hluas Txog Hnub Laus: When the Days of Youth are Gone (Bee Yang, 2014)
This is an album of Hmong song poetry, kwv txhiaj hmoob, composed and sung by Bee Yang, Kao Kalia Yang’s father. The album notes and English translation of one of the songs are by Kao Kalia Yang.
Kwv txhiaj is, in the words of Ralph Ellison on the American Blues, “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-cosmic lyricism. As a form, the blues [and kwv txhiaj] is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
NOTE: The duration of the songs do not reflect the actual song length. Please consider ordering the CD for the full songs. Thank you.
*This CD is available for purchase for $15. Click below to order:
