Trinh Cong Son, Vietnam-era Antiwar Singer, Dies at 62
By SETH MYDANS
BANGKOK, April 4 - Trinh Cong Son, an antiwar singer and songwriter whose melancholy music stirred Vietnamese on both sides of the war, died on Sunday and was buried today at a Buddhist temple near Ho Chi Minh City. He was 62.
His family said he had diabetes after years of periodic hospital visits. Residents said thousands of mourners thronged his home, piling bouquets around it.
With his focus on human emotions and his refusal to conform to official dogma, Mr. Son suffered pressure from both the government of South Vietnam, where he lived during the war, and the victorious Communists, who sentenced him to four years of farm labor and political education when the war ended.
But his popularity won out and his music endured; in the last years of his life he was tolerated and even embraced by the government. His songs are widely performed both in Vietnam and among Vietnamese overseas.
"Crying for Trinh Cong Son," read the headline over a full-page tribute in the daily youth newspaper Thanh Nien this week.
"Truth, innocence and beauty in Son's songs surpassed all hostility," th newspaper said.
In his last years he took up painting as well as songwriting and was a fixture, with his friends and his bottle of Scotch, at a cafe in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.
"Now, really, I have nothing to protest," said Mr. Son in an interview last April on the 25th anniversary of end of the war. "I continue to write songs, but they concern love, the human condition, nature. My songs have changed. They are more metaphysical now, because I am not young."
Mr. Son's popularity was at its height during the war years in the 1960's and 1970's when his songs propelled the careers of some of the best-known South Vietnamese singers. He became known internationally as the Bob Dylan of Vietnam, singing of the sorrow of war and the longing for peace in a divided country.
Almost everybody knew the words to songs like "Ngu Di Con" ("Lullaby"), about the pain of a mother mourning her soldier son:
"Rest well my child, my child of the yellow race. Rock gently my child, I have done it twice. This body, which used to be so small, that I carried in my womb, that I held in my arms. Why do you rest at the age of 20 years?"
Because of what it called "defeatist" sentiments like these, the South Vietnamese government tried to suppress Mr. Son's music - which flourished underground and was also listened to clandestinely in the North.
When the war ended in 1975, Mr. Son refused to flee like many other southern Vietnamese including most members of his family. Along with tens of thousands of other southern Vietnamese who remained, he was sentenced to a period of "re-education."
Born the eldest of seven children and trained as a teacher, Mr. Son never married. His siblings fled to Canada and the United States after the war, and since the death of his mother a few years ago he has been the only one of his family in Vietnam.