The Hour Before Dawn

Introduction

A short scene-painting piece of Jingyun dagu, also called Three Spring Scenes, which Liu Baoquan learned from Song Wu

The Hour Before Dawn, also known as Three Spring Scenes, is a traditional short piece of Jingyun dagu, the Beijing drum song, and with Homeward Boat in Wind and Rain it is one of the form's best-known scene-painting pieces. Its title names the end of the second double-hour of the night and the start of the third, the dark time just before daybreak. The piece is built from nine couplets, each with a long, many-layered second line, and in a few strokes it pictures how ordinary people of old China lived at that hour. Jingyun dagu grew out of the wooden-clapper drum song of late-Qing Hebei, and Liu Baoquan, the King of the Drum Song, reshaped it with Beijing pronunciation and new melodies drawn partly from Peking opera. Accounts of his repertoire list this piece among those he learned from the drum singer Song Wu. Luo Yusheng, whose style grew from Liu's, made it one of her signature pieces, and the Changchun Film Studio filmed her performance in 1961.