Yugu Autonomous County in South Gansu is located in the middle of the Hexi Corridor and the north foot of the Qilian Mountains. The Yugu minority, named Yaohu'er or Lianglayugu'er in their own language, is a very special ethnic group. It holds no obvious patriarchal concept of reproduction or distinct awareness of male superiority. The minority is also a romantic ethnic group. As its own written language has lost, its culture, its history in particular, has to be passed down by folk singers of all historical periods. Folk songs of the Yugu minority have diversified contents, beautiful melodies, sprightly rhythm, and sharp ethnic characters. In tune and pattern, Yugu folk songs not only inherited some features of ancient Huns, but also absorbed some characters of layi of the Tibetans, jiuqu of the Mongolians, hua'er of the Hui minority, and banquet tune of the Tu minority, and ingeniously integrate various styles into one.
The Yugu people are good at singing and dancing. The loss of written language gives rise to the flourishing of oral literature of the ethnic group, especially the folk songs which retain many characteristics of folksongs of ancient Dingling, Turkic and Huihu minorities, and share a lot of similarities with modern Hungarian folk songs. The Yugu people like to sing folk songs. In history, there were many professional singers in the minority. They mainly sang for families holding funerals and weddings. Singing plays a very important role in their daily life. As a saying of the Yugu minority goes, "Even when I forget my homeland, I will not forget our language; even when I forget our language, I will not forget our songs".
By language and residential area, Yugu folk songs are divided into eastern folk songs and western ones. The former class is more rustic and bolder, close to Mongolian folk songs in tune; the latter is relatively gentle and deep, and inherits more traditions of Huihu folk songs. Yugu folk songs adopt the pentatonic scale, in which yu, zhi, and shang are most commonly used. As most librettos are in two lines, most tunes are single passages comprising two phrases. Single-phrase passages also account for a certain proportion. As the accent of words in eastern and western Yugu folk songs always falls on the last syllable, it is common to see the rhythmic pattern with a short head and a long end.
Fifths can be frequently found in Yugu folk songs. Generally speaking, it is adopted more in western folk songs than in eastern ones for the development of musical ideas. Conjunct motion is the basis for melodic lines of Yugu folk songs. They mostly consist of almost just conjunct motions. Disjunct motions are mostly disjunct upward/downward motions by fourths and fifths. The folk music works of the Yugu minority are simple in structure. Most of them are closely related to the way of production and living (like pasturing, rearing young animals, and stocking grass) and customs in ancient times. The librettos and poetic meters have much in common with Turkic and Mongolian folk songs recorded in ancient documents, and bear many features of ancient languages. Therefore, Yugu folk songs may have preserved many ancient elements.
