Khon Kab Khwai

Caravan grew out of the 1973 democracy movement. Its founders, Surachai Jantimathawn, known as Nga Caravan, and Wirasak Sunthawnsi, were student activists at Ramkhamhaeng University when the student movement of 1973 helped bring down the military regime of Thanom Kittikachorn. They sympathised with the farmers of the Northeast, and with Mongkhon Uthok and Thongkran Thana they began setting political Thai lyrics to acoustic guitars, traditional instruments and mor lam rhythms, sometimes borrowing melodies straight from songs like A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall. The result launched a new genre, phleng phuea chiwit, songs for life. Khon Kab Khwai, Man and Buffalo, became one of their most popular songs and the title of an early album in 1975. On the surface it celebrates the bond between rice farmers and their water buffalo. But its lyricists, Somkit Singson and Visa Kantap, were both critics of the Thanom regime, and the words call the farmers to head out to the fields carrying not only their ploughs but their guns. It was a pastoral song and a political statement at once. The moment did not last. After the massacre of 6 October 1976, members of Caravan fled with other activists to the countryside and to Laos, sheltering with the Communist Party of Thailand, and only returned after an amnesty in 1979. Songs for life outlived the exile: the genre Caravan started was later carried to huge audiences by Carabao, a band whose very name means buffalo.