A book about Sinhala songs and the real events behind them. Saman Priyankara Nammunige works from a simple premise: songs come into being for all sorts of reasons, and among those reasons, things that actually happened occupy a particular place. A good number of Sinhala songs were written out of real incidents, and listeners who know the incident hear the song differently afterwards — the words carry more weight once you know what prompted them.
The songs gathered here come from the seventies, the eighties and the nineties, and the author's selection favours lyrics of substance and craft from those decades. For each, he sets out the true story that lies behind it: what happened, to whom, and how it found its way into a song. The book is put together for the listener who has heard these songs for years and wants to know where they came from.
The text is entirely in Sinhala, with no English translation, so a reading knowledge of the language is needed. For Sri Lankans abroad who grew up with this music, and for anyone studying Sinhala popular song, it covers a period that produced a great deal of the repertoire still sung and broadcast today.
Published by M. D. Gunasena & Co., a long-established Colombo house publishing in Sinhala and English.
- Author: Saman Priyankara Nammunige
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: Sinhala
- ISBN: 9789552125195
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