Rural music talent Jia Mu enthusiastically carries out family planning cultural performances
When people talk about Jia Mu, deputy director of the Fusu Village Committee, officials and residents of Shuzhuang Township, Shangshui County, Henan Province, all call him a "rural music talent." For many years, all kinds of major cultural activities held in the township have depended on his planning and directing. He teaches residents to play waist drums and do yangko dances; he teaches left-behind children to sing and dance. In Shuzhuang Township, wherever there are cultural activities, Jia Mu is there.
Jia Mu, 60 years old this year, is deputy director of the Fusu Village Committee and has loved music all his life. Self-taught, he has musical talent and can play wind instruments, bowed instruments, and plucked instruments, sing, compose, arrange, direct, and perform, doing all of them. For more than 30 years, whether it was the township government or schools, as long as a large celebration was held, he was invited to plan and guide it, and every year's holiday celebrations include his busy figure.
Jia Mu not only loves music, but also loves literary and artistic creation. He has not only created some songs especially suitable for children to sing, but also created some dramas, skits, crosstalk, three-and-a-half-line verses, clapper talks, and other works that reflect rural family planning, legal education, and the building of a harmonious society, all loved by the masses, and performed them through farmers' cultural performance teams, which were not only welcomed by the masses but also achieved the goal of teaching through entertainment. In 2015, his drama skit "Persuading Mother-in-Law," which reflected the theme of family planning, won a major award in Shangshui County's large-scale cultural performance "Building Harmonious Family Planning, Spreading Marriage and Childbearing Civilization," and was broadcast on Zhoukou TV Station and Shangshui County TV Station.
Jia Mu, who works at the rural grassroots level, had the idea of forming farmers' cultural organizations several years ago. He believed that if every village set up waist drum teams and yangko teams, creating a platform for left-behind women to carry out cultural activities so they could both keep fit and entertain themselves, then the bad habit of playing mahjong would naturally disappear. After the 2009 Spring Festival, Jia Mu told his idea to Wang Xing, the family planning administrator of Fusu Village who loved singing opera, and the two hit it off immediately. Just like that, Wang Xing founded a family farmers' cultural club, and Jia Mu served as the music and opera teacher. Soon after, with the strong support of the village family planning association, they established a farmers' waist drum team, a yangko team, and a family planning cultural performance team.
Hard work pays off. The family planning cultural performance team of Fusu Village became an active cultural performance team in the local area. They not only performed for the masses on the streets, but also often took part in competitions held by the township and county, and the city and county publicity departments and TV stations even filmed special feature programs about them.
Under Jia Mu's guidance, 18 villages in Shuzhuang Township, including Dazhuzhuang, Wuzhuang, Zhongzhenchang, Huzhuang, Weizhuang, Dudian, and Xiaozhuzhuang, successively set up waist drum teams, yangko teams, and square dance teams, and the farmers' cultural life became flourishing. In last year's county-wide square dance competition, the Fusu Village square dance team won second prize.
Starting in the summer vacation of 2012, Jia Mu also every year during summer and winter vacations invited the left-behind children in the village whose parents both worked elsewhere to his home to teach them to play waist drums, do yangko dances, and sing red songs, and the children spent every vacation happily. Because of his outstanding contributions to the building of rural spiritual civilization, Jia Mu has been commended many times by the county's culture and publicity departments. Qiao Lianjun