| Jin Ni, who was born in 1919, is the last living singer who used to work in Paramount Hall, a long-standing and famous club for entertainment in Shanghai, and is thus a witness to a long period of history. Her heyday as a singer coincides with that of Chinese popular songs, from 1939 to 1952. This is a time when a number of urban women embarked on performing career like singing or acting as in such places of entertainment as broadcasting station, cinema and ballroom. In so doing, they managed to break free from the constraint of feudal ethical code, gained financial independence, and greatly improved both their living condition and social status. Jin Ni's experience and life fully exemplify all these drastic social and cultural changes. This thesis tries to offer an oral account of Jin Ni from three perspectives—Jin Ni herself, her relatives and friends and the general history—which reflects the rise and decline of Paramount Hall as well as the entertaining culture of Shanghai in that time, and further makes a theoretical discussion about the characteristics of urban musical culture.In the previous studies about the history of Chinese modern music, the amount of literature dedicated to urban musical culture of Shanghai in old days in form of oral history is relatively small. This thesis, by close examination of Jin Ni's oral account, attempts to recreate the situation of the citizens entertainment in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s and learn about the circumstances where Paramount Hall and Jin Ni existed. Jin Ni's account demonstrated an aspect of Shanghai's entertainment industry then and its positive significance: in a special political and cultural climate, prosperity and predicament coexisted in the development of the urban entertainment of Shanghai. Moreover, the influence of Western culture can be illustrated by the fact that Jin Ni managed to obtain a position in Paramount Hall by taking foreign songs as her regular repertory.Jin Ni's oral account is of great value for musicological scholarship on the modern music history of Shanghai. As first-hand information, it not only helps to make clear the basic historical facts of that time, but also verifies and supplements relevant historical data and thus improves the histography of Chinese modern music. |
