50 years after fall of Saigon, cherished Vietnamese music plays on

Like most kids, Thanh Tân wasn’t always into her parents’ generation’s music. Music was a constant in the second-generation Vietnamese American’s home, particularly “Paris by Night” — a straight-to-video Vietnamese series of “grand live variety shows” featuring musical acts and more that was enormously popular among refugee communities.

“It’s ubiquitous in so many Vietnamese households,” Tân said. “It was a way of learning about our culture and being exposed to our culture.”

For Tân and other Vietnamese immigrant families who primarily fled from South Vietnam to the United States after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 — marking the end of the Vietnam War — Vietnamese music from before 1975 offers a connection to a piece of their culture that was severed after the war and risked being stamped out by the communist government. Its wartime themes conjure memories that were sometimes too painful for parents to discuss with their children, helping younger generations better understand their heritage and the generations before them. Fifty years later, this music is still present in Seattle’s Vietnamese community and even seeing a renewed interest back in Vietnam.

While Tân, a filmmaker and journalist (Tân is a former Seattle Times editorial writer) who was born in Olympia several years after the fall of Saigon, could see the emotional power the music had for her parents, the vintage sounds from her ancestral homeland would take a deeper meaning for her years later.

In 2023, Tân co-founded SEA Vinyl Society, a crew of crate-digging disc jockeys celebrating “music from across the Asian diaspora.” Tân first started collecting records 15 years ago, mostly American rock and soul, until she came across the “Saigon Rock & Soul” compilation released by boutique Seattle label Sublime Frequencies. The album captures a vibrant Saigon music scene from 1968 to 1974 that was heavily influenced by the presence of American troops during the war.

The irresistible funk grooves, garage rock riffs and soulful ballads from artists like Hùng Cường and Mai Lệ Huyền sent Tân down a YouTube rabbit hole, where music that was once banned by the communist regime from North Vietnam — which took control of the South once the war ended — had resurfaced over time thanks to a crowdsourced community of collectors.

“Aside from the fact that I think this music sounds phenomenal and it’s like a time capsule, it’s helping our families,” Tân said. “To this day, it’s still helping to heal us and there’s real value in it.”

Before 1975, popular Vietnamese music was largely separated into two categories: the communist-approved “red” music of the North and the more romantic “yellow” music from the South, named for the primary colors of their respective flags. When the communist government took over the South, yellow music that was influenced by bolero, rumba and contemporary music from the West was outlawed and confiscated.

“When the war ended in 1975, in a lot of ways that’s the day that yellow music died,” Tân said. “The new government came in and basically was like, ‘We’re not going to allow any of this old regime’s music to stand. That’s the music of the enemy. … it’s music of the imperialist. It’s the music of the American. It’s like foreign pollution in our society.’ ”

“(That’s) why I collect sheet music and these vinyl records,” she continued, “because to me they are relics. But also, none of this should exist today. It was all supposed to be burned and destroyed and never heard again.”

Thomas Vo was born around the “transition time” when the Northern forces took over South Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of men, including his grandfather, were incarcerated and sent to “reeducation camps,” where they were tortured and indoctrinated with communist ideology. Vo finished high school in Vietnam before his family fled the country and came to the Pacific Northwest, where his uncle had settled in Portland. 

“We had a beautiful life, we had the luxury Saigon until we got invaded,” said Vo, now a Seattle-area singer who performs as Son Duy. “They took everything from us. … I remember my family, we got hit several times because they took away houses from us, took away cars. They … came into our house and burned all the books, took the books away and vinyl — we had so many vinyls.”

After 1975, listening to “the old music” (as Vo called it) or Western music in Vietnam had to be done in secret through hidden records and cassettes played quietly at night. Sheet music was passed down over the years and hobby musicians like Tân’s father and his friends would play the songs themselves in living rooms.

Refugee hubs in places like Paris and Orange County, Calif., gave birth to new record labels and production companies, including Paris by Night, that kept the yellow music alive from abroad, even making its way back into Vietnam.

“I remember when I was a kid, we had to go to the black market (where) they sell cassette tapes,” Vo said. “They were smuggling the old music into Vietnam during the ’80s and ’90s until after like 2000, the Vietnamese communist government (became) more open to accept it because they just cannot put the pressure down (on) people, so they had to be more open.”

Vo points to former President Bill Clinton’s historic trip to Vietnam in 2000 as a turning point when the Vietnamese government began softening its stance on the long-forbidden music. Six years after the U.S. lifted its embargo on Vietnam in 1994, Clinton became the first American president to formally visit the country since U.S. forces withdrew in 1975.

While many of the exiled yellow music stars from pre-1975 are deceased or no longer performing, Tân said those who have returned to live or tour in Vietnam have given mixed statements on whether they faced any censorship performing their songs in recent years. 

“I also suspect there’s just a lot of self-censorship,” Tân said. “People know what they can and what they can’t sing.”

In the Seattle area, yellow music still fills Vietnamese homes, community events, SEA Vinyl Society’s pop-up listening parties — including an upcoming session at Mam’s Books (4-7 p.m. May 9) — and monthly Saigon nights at casinos, where Vietnamese artists regularly perform and DJs remix old Vietnamese classics into modern EDM party starters.

The garage rock riffs and swinging soul-funk heard on “Saigon Rock & Soul” might seem a world apart from those dance-floor remixes aimed at younger crowds. But Sublime Frequencies co-founder Hisham Mayet has watched the compilation — one of the most popular releases in the label’s 22-year history — connect with younger generations of Vietnamese music lovers in both the U.S. and Vietnam.

“There wasn’t an awareness of some of these kind of underground sounds that were coming out of Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s because they were buried or lost or destroyed,” Mayet said. “There was never a story told about that scene at that era, and the cultural significance of that. For today’s younger Vietnamese audiences, I think that everyone’s just had their mind blown. And in a sense, it’s really reconnected a lot of the younger Vietnamese music obsessives to recontextualize their parents’ and grandparents’ music.”

Count Tân among them. Along with her record collecting, she wants to find more ways to archive and preserve Vietnam’s pre-1975 music and the stories of these artists once exiled or silenced, who are now in their twilight years. For one of her upcoming projects, Tân is curating a multimedia exhibit titled “Kho Tàng Nhạc Vàng/Vietnam’s Golden Music Archive,” which will open in June at King Street Station and feature her collection of rare vinyl, sheet music and photographs from “South Vietnam’s golden music era.” 

“For the Vietnamese abroad, this is our legacy,” Tân said. “And if we want to preserve it, we better start being a lot more intentional about listening to this music and contextualizing it and trying to properly interpret it.”