At the night before the marriage, the bride's parents call up all the relatives and friends to set up a "green shed" for the bride and her best girl friend to live in symbolizing that the bride takes the first step to leave her parents and family.

Before the bride leaves the family house to live in the green straw shed, she begins to cry and sing following the traditional words of the song, or she may sing extempore verse if she feels it can better express her mixed feelings of happiness and sadness: happy for she will marry her beloved and live a new life she looks forward to, sad for she has to leave her parents and family.

It is said that the singing was mostly improvisation long before. It's based on hundreds of thousands of years’ extempore verse that today’s lyric poem Crying Marriage has been formed and it is deemed as a masterpiece of Yi people’s literature.