Yao folk songs run through all fields of social life. Yao people with adult men at home should choose a date for their "Du Rong" before the Spring Festival, and those who want to marry relatives should try to hold it before the Spring Festival. However, whether it is fighting, getting married, or visiting relatives and friends, Yao people talk with songs, so it can be said that nothing will happen without songs. Therefore, the Yao nationality is a good singer. They are unique in their songs and express their profound thoughts.
Qu Dajun, a poet in the Qing Dynasty, once wrote a poem, "Yao folk songs are the most important, men and women are mixed, and hundreds of songs are sung together". Yao folk songs have a wide range of contents, ranging from astronomy and geography to trivial matters; As far as Pangu opens the sky, as close as the eyebrows; From the historical changes of regime change to farming weddings, funerals and celebrations, they all came out casually and became articles. We don't know when Yao folk songs came into being, but they are closely related to the introduction of China culture. There is such a narrative in the folk song "Three Sisters" of the Yao story: "Confucius wrote a book about Yan Hui, and Three Sisters became famous all over the world". From the contents of Yao songs, we can still find Confucius' Confucianism. Yao songs are generally seven-character poems, which don't pay attention to rhyme, but pay great attention to comparison and parallelism. Yao folk songs have distinct regional characteristics, which are reflected in the tunes of folk songs. The melody of Yao folk songs is gentle and euphemistic, without that kind of high-pitched gorgeous, but as soft and distant as a clear spring. But the tunes in different regions are very different. Yao people living in 8 counties of Wenshan are basically the same as those living in Shizong of Qujing and Jinping of Honghe, but there are still differences. However, the estuaries of Honghe, Tianlin and Lingyun in Guangxi are quite different, and the singing tone is completely different, which may be related to the long-term frequent migration of Yao people.
According to the common classification of Yao people, they can be divided into two categories. One kind is "Autumn Lotus" folk songs. A Chinese character has three pronunciations in Yao language, one is dialect pronunciation, the other is folk song pronunciation, and the other is chanting. Autumn Lotus, a folk song, is sung together with folk songs and belongs to a common category. Beginners must also learn the singing method of Autumn Lotus first. The second category is "vernacular" folk songs, that is, singing in dialects. If Yao folk songs are divided into three realms: upper, middle and lower, singers who can sing "vernacular" folk songs will reach the intermediate realm. Because even children can understand "vernacular" folk songs, this kind of singing is very humorous, but the artistic conception is very profound, not everyone can understand, and not every singer can sing. From the content and function, it can be divided into etiquette, education, narration, sacrifice, love, guessing, festivals, humanities and so on, and the content is very extensive. Yao folk songs can't be understood literally from Chinese characters, and their significance is irrelevant. In recent years, due to the increasing communication between Yao traditional culture and the outside world, some singers who are proficient in Chinese language and literature have been trying to unify the meanings expressed by Yao folk songs and Chinese characters, and have achieved certain results. This is a gratifying thing, a manifestation of the civilization and progress of the times, and an inevitable requirement of conforming to historical development.