What is the historical background of the musical masterpiece "Fishing Boat Singing Late"?

"Fishing boat sings late" is an excellent traditional Zheng music recognized by the music industry. The title is taken from Preface to Wang Tengting by Wang Bo, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, "Fishing boats sing late, making Li Peng poor".

However, it is a "public case" in the field of folk music, and there are still different opinions about its emergence, who is its author and adapter. It is said that Lou Shuhua, a guzheng expert, adapted it from the material of the ancient song Return in Ming and Qing Dynasties in the mid-1930s. It is also said that Jin Zhuonan, an expert in Shandong Guzheng, adapted the traditional folk music "Shuangban" and its variant "Flowing Mountain Rock" and "Sunset on the Third Ring Road" in his early years. In the early 1980s, Jiang Baohai of Shandong Liaocheng Art Museum wrote that two ditties, which were adapted by Jin Zhuonan according to the local folk Zheng Song's "Shuangban" and evolved from "Shuangban", were "passed on to Lou Shuhua, and Lou Shuhua slightly adapted them to become the current score book"; 1986 Guqin musician Cheng Gongliang wrote an article in the 7th issue of Music magazine, revealing that on 1929, he came across an old folk music player who studied with Lou Shuhua in Beijing and recorded the score of Fishing Boat Singing Night. The discovery of this information makes the formation of this famous song more difficult to draw a conclusion.

Guzheng has a history of more than two thousand years. Before the fishing boat sang late, the ancients used it to play mostly sad sounds, so it was also called "mourning Zheng" or "bitter Zheng". "Fishing boat sang late" can be said to be the first music in the traditional guzheng repertoire to express happy scenes.