Maithili song marks every passage of life and season. Sohar celebrates a birth; Samdaun bids a daughter farewell at marriage; Jat-Jatin is danced by couples in the monsoon moonlight; and the lyric Vidyapati-geet carry the medieval poet’s words into living tradition. Above all stand the Chhath songs, sung at the river ghats at dawn and dusk.
No voice embodied this world more than Sharda Sinha, the Bihar Kokila, whose recordings became inseparable from Chhath itself. Today singers like Maithili Thakur and the Bollywood playback legend Udit Narayan carry Maithili music to new audiences, while the old genres still sound in courtyards across the region.