culture

Among the famous songs favoured by the Korean people is folk song The Girl on the Swing created decades ago.

The song writer is Choe Ro Sa and composer Kim Jun Do, and they are wife and husband.

Here is the story about how the song was produced.

During the Fatherland Liberation War, Choe Ro Sa served as a girl nurse at a field hospital of the Korean People’s Army.

One day, a soldier was rushed to the hospital. Unexpectedly, the wounded soldier was Kim Jun Do, who had studied at Kim Il Sung University with her before the war. Choe was in charge of Jun Do and cared for him deeply. Kim recovered from the injury and left for the front.

Later, Choe and Kim returned to the university according to the measure taken by the country to recall all soldiers who joined the army as they studied at universities and had an emotional reunion.

They studied hard, holding pens in their hands instead of guns. Then one day Choe was in the jaws of death owing to a sudden illness. Kim Jun Do took her on his back and rushed to the hospital, crossing over several steep mountain passes.

As a result, Choe Ro Sa could have a narrow escape from death.

They fell in love with each other as they saved one another from death, and finally tied the knot.

Kim, who had an unusual sense of music from his childhood, had once taken part in a schoolchildren’s art performance when he was a schoolboy. He became a composer of the then National Folk Art Theatre after graduating from the university as he was much more attached to music than his major, linguistics. Choe began to work at the National Art Theatre as a full-time writer. 

They wanted to represent the stirring reality of the country, which was rising up from ashes in the period of postwar reconstruction, in their songs. But it was not an easy job to find the seed of a work which would give people delight and suit the national sentiment.

One spring day in 1956, Choe went to a farm village on the outskirts of Pyongyang to help farmers transplant rice seedlings with her friends. At the rest time she took out her notebook and pencil.

Such fantastic scenery of the countryside she saw as the gentle breeze blew on the balmy spring day, the vast blue sky, the swinging site full of joy of the girls who finished rice transplantation and orioles flying in the sky gave her uncontrollable excitement for creation, and she wrote lyrics at a go.

Choe returned home and showed her lyrics to her husband, who just began to compose a piece of music for them moving his shoulder up and down. But his wife showed regret. Some parts were not so interesting. The couple sat together and pooled wisdom overnight to create a song.

They polished up and completed it and it was the song The Girl on the Swing.

At that time the song, which was sung by a folk singer for the first time, was widely known to the whole country through the radio.

However, they could not imagine that the song they created would be a famous song of the times.

Chairman Kim Jong Il praised it as one of the songs which were very popular among the Korean people as it represents the optimistic sentiments of life and happy and worthwhile life of the girl farmers enjoying the holiday, saying that if the song was well orchestrated, the people would like it more.

The orchestral music The Girl on the Swing thus produced was widely acclaimed by the people.

The song left a deep impression on the audiences not only at home but also at the international music festival.

Half a century has passed, but the folk song The Girl on the Swing, which is still widely sung on the stages of art performances and in the life of the people, brings back fond memory of its creators.

U Jong Hwan