🎭 The Arirang Busan Hears Tonight Isn’t a 600-Year-Old Relic — It’s a Song Still Growing — Woody Magazine, Jun. 13, 2026

Woody Magazine

A Song Still Growing

🎭 Culture — The real age of the Arirang the world sings

Jun. 13, 2026 (Sat.)

🎭 Culture

The Arirang Busan Hears Tonight Isn’t a 600-Year-Old Relic — It’s a Song Still Growing

BTS is carrying Arirang to the world. But the single song the world sings back is younger than almost anyone assumes.

Tonight, tens of thousands of voices fill Busan Asiad Stadium on Korea’s southern coast for the second and final night of BTS’s two-show ARIRANG stand in Busan — falling, as it happens, on June 13, the seven-member group’s debut anniversary, thirteen years on. Begun in Goyang in April, the tour runs to 85 shows across 34 cities in 23 countries, the largest ever mounted by a Korean act, and crowds far from Korea have learned to carry its Korean-language refrain: arirang, arirang, arariyo. The album that names the tour, released in March, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and its songs topped Billboard’s Global Excl. U.S. chart six times this year, breaking Taylor Swift’s record for the most. On July 19, BTS will share the first-ever World Cup final halftime show, at MetLife Stadium outside New York, with Madonna and Shakira.

So the word “Arirang” is suddenly everywhere, and nearly everyone treats it the same way: as the single, unchanging folk song Koreans have sung for centuries. The official framing agrees. UNESCO inscribed Arirang on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2012 (North Korea added its own version in 2014), and the U.S. Library of Congress, writing about the BTS album, called it “the most famous traditional Korean folk song,” with a 600-year history.

Lift the lid, though, and the picture shifts. To begin with, there is no single Arirang. UNESCO’s own description calls it not one song but “the outcome of collective contributions made by ordinary Koreans throughout generations” — a family of roughly 60 versions and some 3,600 variants that share only the refrain. No fixed author, no authoritative original. The genuinely old roots are regional: the “three great Arirangs” of Jeongseon, Jindo, and Miryang, towns and districts scattered across the peninsula.

So where does the tune the world sings actually come from? Scholars call it Bonjo (“the main strain”), or Gyeonggi Arirang, after the province ringing Seoul. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, published by the Academy of Korean Studies, generally attributes it to a 1926 silent film — also titled Arirang — directed by Na Woon-gyu. Its story of a young man driven mad by torture under Japanese colonial rule detonated across the country after opening at the Danseongsa theater in Seoul on October 1, 1926, and its theme song spread with it, becoming “the song of the nation.” The old regional Arirangs are the source; the version we now call the Arirang is closer to a modern standard — the main current of a “new folk song” boom that swept the 1930s.

What is old is the scattered “Arirangs.” The one the world sings is, in fact, the young one.

The paper trail fits. Arirang was passed mouth to mouth, without a score. The first person to fix the melody in Western notation was Homer Hulbert, an American missionary and educator, who transcribed it in an 1896 essay, “Korean Vocal Music,” for a Seoul magazine called The Korean Repository. That “Hulbert Arirang” is still the earliest known transcription — a point even North Korean scholars conceded at a 2018 conference. Notation in 1896; a film that carried the standard version nationwide in 1926. The decisive moments all sit inside the last hundred years.

Which raises an obvious question. If the film was silent, how did a melody travel through it? The answer is that “silent” described the screen, not the room. Korean cinemas of the era were anything but quiet. A byeonsa — a live narrator, cousin to the Japanese benshi — stood beside the screen reading the plot and voicing the characters; a house band played; and the theme song rang out in the hall. The Encyclopedia’s account has the film open on its theme and close on it again, the song lingering as the hero is led away by police. The tune sounded out loud for the length of every screening. Beyond the theater, gramophone records and sheet music took over. Na Woon-gyu’s own Pungunga (released in English as A Soldier of Fortune) survives today only as a narration record: pressed by Columbia in 1931, it preserved the byeonsa Kim Yeong-hwan’s commentary and the singer Lee Ae-ri-su’s voice. A film’s song, copied to disc and replayed without end. The screen was silent; the song never was.

This appears to collide with the 600-year figure, but the two belong to different layers. “Six centuries” is an estimate for the whole family of songs that carry the name. The single standard version the world sings in unison — and its standing as the song that binds a nation — was forged across 1896, 1926, and the 1930s. Even the film’s halo as a symbol of anti-colonial resistance hardened later: by the Korean Film Archive’s account, it set around 1969, with the film historian Lee Young-il’s history of Korean cinema. Much of what we call “ancient tradition” was, in truth, made and polished in the modern age.

So when BTS sings Arirang, they are not lifting a relic from a glass case. Arirang has always survived by riding the dominant medium of its day — silent film and the byeonsa under colonial rule, radio after liberation, and now the stadium, the streaming queue, the Billboard chart. That it is a hundred years old rather than six does not diminish it. It says the opposite: Arirang is not a museum piece but a song still growing. Tonight in Busan, as tens of thousands carry the refrain, its history adds another line.

💡 Today’s Point

What the world sings as “the” Arirang isn’t a single 600-year tradition. First notated in 1896 and standardized by a 1926 film, it is closer to an invented tradition — one the modern age made.

Sources

• Source ↗UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage — Arirang, lyrical folk song in the Republic of Korea (inscribed 2012; ~60 versions, 3,600 variants; collective creation)
• Source ↗Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (Academy of Korean Studies) — Arirang: the three regional Arirangs as source; Gyeonggi/Bonjo Arirang traced to the film
• Source ↗Encyclopedia of Korean Culture — the film Arirang (1926, dir. Na Woon-gyu; opened at Danseongsa)
• Source ↗The Korea Times — Historical roots of BTS’ ‘ARIRANG’: Hulbert’s transcription 130 years ago
• Source ↗Korean Film Archive (KMDb) — Questioning the myth of Arirang and Na Woon-gyu (nationalist myth set from c. 1969)
• Source ↗Korean Film Archive — Restoration of the byeonsa narration record for the silent film Pungunga / A Soldier of Fortune (Columbia, 1931)
• Source ↗U.S. Library of Congress, Folklife Today — “Arirang” Album by BTS Draws on AFC’s Collections (600-year, traditional framing)
• Source ↗Global Citizen — FIFA World Cup 2026 Final Halftime Show (July 19; BTS, Madonna, Shakira)
• Source ↗Billboard — ARIRANG debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200; songs sweep the Global Excl. U.S. chart

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