When Benguet music was downright vulgar

BAGUIO CITY—Way before Benguet music turned country, there were swinging (ritual chanting) and adultery songs.

A new book chronicles how Cordillerans and other indigenous peoples in the Philippines courted through risqué and sometimes downright vulgar songs and riddles.

So risqué that Morice Vanoverbergh, a Belgian missionary who explored and studied the Cordillera in the 1920s and 1950s, had to translate these not in English but in Latin.

“Vanoverbergh did not provide an English translation of the lines in Kankanay (Kankanaey) that, apparently, he believed would be less offensive if rendered in Latin,” wrote Herminia Menez Coben in her book, “Poetics, Society and History.”

Coben, who teaches Philippine Folklore and Society at University of California in Los Angeles, said two such songs in the Kankanaey culture are the “daday” and the “daing.”

The daday is a form of ritual insult where the bride is “insulted” by the women in the community because if she is beautiful, she would seduce their husbands, and if she’s not, she would be a disgrace to her partner.

The exchange would go on in rhyme and allusions and the bride would assert her sexual freedom so much that Vanoverbergh would translate it in Latin.

An example would be, “Ulay pay kankanaen / dandakami pay mendedeen,” and the good missionary would translate it thus, “Say what you will / Habebimus copulam.” Or “Eyak pay aagpiten / tay eyak asawaen,” as “Premam inter femora mea / I shall marry him.”

Harder would be the “swinging songs” of which Vanoverbergh found 130 examples in 1926.

“Many are very obscene, either plainly so or cloaked in ambiguous expressions that are unintelligible to people who are not initiated,” Coben quoted Vanoverbergh as saying. “It is in the swinging songs, more so in any other part of Igorot literature, that undisguised immorality and crudity of expression appear more frequently,” he added.

In the swinging songs, the men and women are grouped by sexes and they would engage in sexual jousting. “Two groups of male and female guests formed a double crescent, with all the men in front and the women behind,” Coben wrote.

“While the choristers moved very slowly or swayed back and forth sideways, their arms interlaced but with no physical contact between the sexes,” Coben added.

Among the symbols for the male sex organ were spear, taro shoot and clay knife while those for the woman would be peas, frogs and crabs. Rice is also used as symbol for fertility.

Sadly, the daday and and the daing were all but forgotten in the Kankanaey culture. Instead they were replaced by John Denver, Travis Tritt, Garth Brooks and Crystal Gale, who try as they might, will never be “Latinized” by Belgian missionaries.