What are the characteristics of folk songs?

Folk songs are mainly distributed in plateau, inland, mountain villages, fishing villages and ethnic minority areas. It is widely distributed and rich in reserves. Folk songs are one of the basic genres of China folk songs. Popular in plateaus, mountainous areas and hilly areas, any folk song with free rhythm and long melody that people sing for masturbation and self-entertainment when walking, cutting firewood, grazing and mowing grass. It is believed that pastoral songs, hymns and banquet songs sung by herdsmen on the grassland, fishing songs and boat songs sung by fishermen on rivers, lakes and seas, and "crying wedding songs" sung at weddings in some places in the south should also belong to folk songs.

Folk songs are folk songs in which working people can express their feelings freely. The most common content in traditional folk songs is love and suffering. Folk songs are often sung outdoors. The tune is loud, the rhythm is free and long, and the lyrics are mostly improvised. The lyrics of folk songs have the characteristics of simple emotion, bold imagination and clever metaphor, which are vivid and touching. Folk songs often have the highest tone of the whole song at the beginning of music, full of emotion and strong expressive force. In the high-pitched area, folk songs often have a free expansion. Some folk songs combine falsetto or true and false sounds because of their high range.