Burmese Folk Music Is Fading Out
Listeners turn to foreign genres, rejecting folk songs often associated with the military regime. A school, though, is scrambling to save what’s left of a rich tradition.
LOS ANGELES TIMES | A Times Staff Writer
U Tin cut his teeth as a musician playing Burmese folk songs for silent movies, which in this time warp of a country remained popular well into the 1950s.
The 80-year-old recalls the challenge of playing guitar, watching the conductor and looking at the screen simultaneously, four shows a day. Periodically they’d mess up the sound effects, leaving the audience to wonder why a bang occurred well after the gunfight ended.
“Some of the band leaders were quite drunk, particularly by the late show,” he said. “But we managed.”
Today, he sits on his well-worn floor surrounded by memories and his beloved string instruments lined up like sleeping maidens.
With minimal encouragement, he grabs a sort of battered hubcap attached to a cricket bat, his homemade banjo, and croons a folk song about a girl from Yangon worried about keeping her skin fair.
The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that the 2010 Census showed the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2010, was 308,745,538. The resident population represented an increase of 9.7 percent over the 2000 U.S. resident population of 281,421,906. The U.S. resident population represents the total number of people in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. 
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