The Music of Hindostan c7.43

c7.43

These Garhwālīs had come from the hills: I went next to Dehra Dūn, a few miles below Mussouri, and met with some more of the same tribe. Their songs follow below. Most of the words were, I was told, mere snatches of sentences, often in the wrong order, learnt by heart without understanding, interspersed with tags for the sake of the rhyme. The first half dozen were sung by a small boy. The intervals between the verses he occasionally filled up by a combined smack of the lips and clack of the tongue to represent the thud, or rather the squeeze (see Chap. IX) of the drum, which would at that place have a solo, in order to give the singer time to recover his breath. The other songs were given by men soli, or by women in chorus.