Ottoman History Podcast - American Music of the Ottoman Diaspora

Episode Date: June 1, 2019

Episode 412 with Ian Nagoski hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of people from the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman states emigrated to the U.S. Among them were musicians, singers, and artists who catered to the new diaspora communities that emerged in cities like New York and Boston. During the early 20th century, with the emergence of a commercial recording industry in the United States, these artists appeared on 78 rpm records that circulated within the diaspora communities of the former Ottoman Empire in the United States and beyond, singing in languages such as Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish, and Ladino. Their music included folks songs from their homelands and new compositions about life and love in the diaspora. In this episode, Ian Nagoski of Canary Records joins the podcast to showcase some of these old recordings, which he has located and digitized over the years, and we discuss some of the remarkable life stories of these largely forgotten artists in American music history. « Click for More »

موسيقى اشبر بخمرك و بلميك اشتركوا في نومك تاين تاري تاري اشتركوا اشتركوا اشتركوا اشتركوا اشتركوا اشتركوا تاري تاري تاري تاري تاري تاري تاري تاري اشتركوا اشتركوا اشتركوا اشتركوا Thank you. İzlediğiniz için teşekkür ederim. Welcome to Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton.

We've got a very special episode for our listeners today. This isn't the usual fair. It's going to be all about music. A lot of our guests come from an academic background, but we've got a guest with a totally different set of expertise and skills on the podcast today, Ian Nagoski. Ian, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. Ian Nagoski is a self-described amateur who has approached Ottoman history through one section of the material culture available in the United States, that of 78 RPM discs, so old records. A researcher and reissue record producer, Ian Nagoski has given numerous talks

throughout Europe and the US, including the Library of Congress here in Washington, DC. And what we're going to talk about in this interview is the work Nagoski has done over the past decade on the immigrant musicians from Ottoman territories. He's issued more than 10 hours of music pertaining to the immigrant communities from the Ottoman Empire on CD, LP, and digitally on his label, Canary Records. You can find Canary Records on Bandcamp or visit our website, ottomahistorypodcast.com for an easy link. So Ian, before we talk more about your work, tell our listeners what we just heard at the outset of the podcast. It was a record from the teens by a woman named Mary Steele, a song called Nari. And I wanted

to play it because it demonstrates a couple of things that you run into with the old records. One of which is that we don't know who Mary Steele is, and we never will. In fact, I made that copy at the Armenian Library and Museum of America. I was trying to gather as much of the Mary Steele material as I could. I think she recorded two separate sessions in three or four different languages,

Turkish, Assyrian, Greek, Armenian. I forget what else. She recorded a whole bunch of languages and very, very folky stuff. So my original idea was that she was a pseudonym for a better known singer. After listening through to the dozen or so pieces I've gotten to hear, she's clearly not. She's somebody else. But we don't know who. I mean, how do you find somebody named Mary Steele? Well, maybe you just can't. That's it.

She just might be a cipher and a dead end. And you run into those sometimes. Yeah. There are good records and there are a lot of interesting stories and she would be a fascinating person to know about, but maybe we'll just never know. And that's part of the frustration and part of the fun of doing the kind of work you do, collecting old records, right? You know, our listeners will get to know more and more about your work as we go on.

But, you know, I just wanted to ask how you got started on this. How did you become obsessed with early 20th century immigrant music from the Ottoman Empire? Well, I was always somebody who went digging around through old records. And I had a general rule for myself that I would buy anything that was cheap, that was in a language that I didn't know, which is everything that isn't English. And often it is cheap because people are looking for the music they know already in the US. Right, exactly. So 20 years ago, when I started buying 78 RPM discs,

the stuff that anybody wanted that cost money were records that had to do with the broad narrative of Americana. It was jazz, blues, country, gospel to a much lesser extent. So when I started coming across records in Arabic and Turkish and Greek, and they were 50 cents or a dime, I would just pick them up and listen to them. And if they were good, then I hung on to them. But over time, it began to dawn on me that a lot of the records were being made in the same place at the same time in these different languages. and it began to dawn on me that there might be some of the same accompanists on different of these records that the performers might have known each other right it turns out that in new york city there certainly was a small cross-pollinating scene of these performers from the near east and uh and they did either know each other or knew people in common. And they were very often, you know,

recording in the same room in the Woolworth building for Columbia Records. So because I needed to know some biographical stuff about certain of these people, I went looking for every little bit of information I could find and started to build a picture of the world that these people had come from and the world in which they were living when they sat a picture of the world that these people had come from and the world in which they were living when they sat in front of the machine for three minutes and recorded whatever it was that we get to hear back on these old discs. And as we're going to talk about more in this conversation

as we move through some of these old tracks, our listeners are going to hear that a lot of what they were singing about was their immediate experience of coming to America, of being in America, that experience that many of the audience would presumably share, the great experience of migration. It was a way of recording that was very, very present, making the old 70 RPM discs. There is no going back and polishing and overdubbing. There's no mix or equalization. You sit down in front of the microphone, whatever it is you do during that three minutes, that's what goes out. And that's what gets pressed into what is

essentially a rock. The records are made 70, 80% stone. So these are things that will last for hundreds and hundreds of years, way past you and I being long gone. And it's that three minutes of that person's life, whatever it was that was important to them at that time. And the ones that survive in many cases are ones that sold prolifically. The ones that are widely still available or in circulation are ones that meant a great deal to their audience. Right. And so for the first part of our conversation, what we want to do is set up the early history of recording in the languages of the Ottoman Empire. We're going to play you a track, tell you all about it, and get into that history. Müzik Hüzriyetin yolu var, heda olsun canına.

Hüzriyetin yolu var, heda olsun canına. Yaşasın hüznüye, edaret bulsavak, yaşasın millet. Yaşasın hüznüye, edaret bulsavak, yaşasın millet. Kalkın hey vatan taşlar Sevgilerim kardeşler Kalkın hey vatan taşlar Sevgilerim kardeşler Altyazı M.K. Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok Altyazı M.K. ПЕСНЯ Bravo, bravo! So that was a record made March 8th, 1909, in Constantinople by the Gramophone Company. The artists are almost certainly Roma and are credited as Gulistan Hanim, who was the singer, and Arab Muhammad, who's the Zerna player. The title of that track in English is Our Night Turned to Daybreak.

Arab Muhammad, his Zerna playing, turns up on a bunch of old Turkish 78s of that period. That disc I'm playing in particular because it's an example of the material that was issued in the United States for immigrants before immigrants in the United States actually started recording. companies in the U.S., particularly the two big majors before the Second World War, Victor and Columbia, first began marketing stuff to the immigrant populations by issuing actual material from the homeland, some of which was very elevated classical music. You get reissues in the U.S. of Abdul Hai Hilmi and Shemuel Bey, as well as these very very down-home folky things, kind of runs the gamut. Because they weren't entirely sure what it was that the immigrants were going to buy, if they were going to buy anything at all. So it was a kind of a market test. And it turned out that it worked pretty well. Worth pointing out that when that record's issued in the United States, 1910, 1911, 1912, somewhere in there,

you know, is the peak of immigration in the United States for all of U.S. history. 1907 is the single largest year of immigration in U.S. history. And the record business was brand new, really. The two big disc companies, Victor and Columbia, both start in Washington, D.C., right around the very end of the 19th century. So they're casting around for, you know,

what in the world could people buy? And they're putting out records of people imitating animals. They're putting out records of people laughing. They're taking lots of shots in the dark just to see what it is that people might want. The first recording sessions overseas, St. Petersburg, Baku, Burma, all that, you know, starts 1903, 1904,

mainly to sell machines. That's where you make the money. But people aren't going to buy the machines. They're not going to buy the hardware if there's no software they want to use on it, right? So you go there and you record the stuff that you think they like. And then if they do, then they buy a machine and that's where you make your money. So how do we get to the point where we have the first recordings of the Ottoman diaspora in the United States? 1912, a guy shows up at Columbia Studios

named M.G. Parzekian. I'm not sure, but I think Parzekian announces himself at Columbia Studios at the Woolworth Building and says, you're not recording what my people want to hear. Or he says, I have a band and I want to record something. And I think it's the case that Columbia responded to him. That's fine. It'll cost you a thousand dollars and we'll record you and we'll put the records out. That's a ton of money at that time. I'm a thousand dollars in today's money.

I'm saying it's, you know, roughly what, you know, like a demo or something. Yeah. day's money i'm saying it's you know roughly what you know like a demo or something yeah it's like what a a blue collar you know streetcar driver or something would make in two weeks you know it's a pile of money and so prosekyan has this band he's got uh four guys and uh one guy is a syrian um and uh several guys are armenian and they record about a dozen sides for Columbia and they sell. People want them. They're all folk music from Urfa, Southern Turkish performances.

And Parzekian was already an entrepreneur in the music business. He was already importing discs from Cairo, Beirut, Constantinople to market to the immigrant communities. And I think he saw a market gap and knew that there were musicians who were talented enough in New York to move a few units. So he begins putting these things out in 1912. Columbia sees an opportunity, and they continue to record fairly prolifically in Turkish. And as the story of Parsekian you just told kind of illustrates, from its very origins,

the recording industry of the Ottoman diaspora is essentially like multi-ethnic, multilingual, in the sense that this is the same performer recording in multiple languages with people in the ensemble who might be from different ethno-linguistic communities of the Ottoman Empire. Absolutely. One very often finds people who are recording in three or four languages. The geographic space of New York City has, I think, something to do with that. Okay, so there are enclaves, various places. There's a Greek community up around 8th Avenue and 41st Street, but then there's another Greek community down at the bottom of the island around the ports, and another Greek community up around 183rd Street. Up around 183rd Street, there's also an Armenian church and enclave,

but then there's another Armenian enclave around 3rd Avenue. Meanwhile, down the Lower East Side in the Jewish section, there's all the Sephardic and Romano Jews and the Romano Synagogue. And then across the bridge over in Brooklyn, big Arab community,

in addition to the Arab community on Washington Street. So for a musician who needs gigs, you need a place where people are sitting and having drinks and something to eat to play for. You're going to go to all of those places and you're going to meet people who are smoking water pipes and wearing fezzes all over the place, and know some tunes in common. You'll find something in common with them. So the music flourishes in that sense, and you get a cross-pollination, even as people have their own styles and their own limits of what it is they like to do, or their own self-image of themselves as musicians and individuals, artists. And so the first track we're going to play here is actually Parsekian. It's a

great example of that ecosystem that he was part of. This is from the Parsekian sessions. This is actually the singer is a guy named Khosrow Malul, who was Assyrian. And he's singing in Kurdish. This is possibly the first Kurdish language performance made in the U.S. It might be the second. There's another performance of his on the subject of the Navruz holiday that was a month or two earlier, which I think might be in Kurdish. I happen to know this one is, and I happen to have a decent copy of it. And it happens to include the word America in it. So I thought it was worth hearing. I'd love a translation of this one

if anybody's able to do it at some point. All right, we're putting the word out there. I'm sure some of our listeners do know Kurdish. So if you understand what you're hearing, get in touch with us and enjoy these tracks. ਮੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੀ ਵੁਨੇ ਵੇ ਵਾਰੇ ਰੋਤੁ ਨੇ ਮਾਲੁ ਮੇ ਆ ਰਾ ਵਾ��ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲ་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲଇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଱་ଲੇ ଇੱଇ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ ଛੀ आखरा माल्मे च्यादे आवे रख्ये स्यावे दिने कोबा कोबा के विवो जाप्ष सरेम दाब्रने सरेम मोशि रहल मायान। Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Thank you. Gjørens morg, Thank you. Gjørens morg. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Thank you. Okay, welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Grayton here talking to Ian Nagoski about the music of early Ottoman and post-Ottoman immigrants in the United States. and post-Ottoman immigrants in the United States. The first track we just heard was from the group of M.G. Parsegian,

a performance in Kurdish by the Assyrian singer Khusraf Malul. And then we heard a second track. Ian, can you tell us about the track? Well, Al-Jazair is from the very first recording made in the U.S. marketed to an Arabic-speaking population. It is notable in a bunch of ways. Malouf was second generation. He was Syrian, born in the U.S., and performed as an active hybridizer. Before he recorded that performance in 1913, he had published a number of pieces of sheet music, including a song called The Egyptian Slide,

and was somebody who was actively interested in hybridizing American popular music and Arabic music. He ran a record label. He was one of two people on Washington Street in Manhattan to run record labels, the other being A.J. Maxud, who was an Egyptian cop. Malouf's label was mostly of his band playing this hybridized music

that he was personally responsible for. His label ran through the 20s, and when the Depression hit in the 1930s and things got tough, he was on the road a lot. We know he played in Wilmington, Delaware, and Baltimore, and kind of all up and down the East Coast. Wound up going out to Janet Studios in the 30s and recorded a bunch of organ pieces marketed specifically to roller rinks and to funeral parlors.

So he was a working musician, published a lot of sheet music of arrangements of Western popular music. Interesting guy. And so, as you said, we have this particular recording we listened to is from before the First World War, actually. So very early, but it's by a second generation Arab immigrant to the United States from the Ottoman Empire. At this point, Arab diaspora is creating their own music in America. So let's talk more about the immigrant experience as it's expressed in some of the records that you've found and restored and digitized and made available.

I want to start out maybe by introducing one of the more famous tracks from that period on this theme with the title, Why Did I Come to America? Neden geldim Amerika ya? So in Turkish, tell us about this track. This is Achilles Poulos, who emigrated through Ellis Island rather like the Elia Kazan film, America, America. He was a Greek guy from northwestern Anatolia and came with a good Armenian pal of his. Both of them were Udists. So they both hit the U.S. in the teens and start recording in the early 20s for little

independent record companies. In particular, the little independent record company run by M.G. Parzekian after Columbia stops recording in Turkish. They start making records there about 1921, 22 thereabouts. And between about 1925 and 1930, Poulos records 125 performances. That's a ton of material. Very, very active performer. He ran a little nightclub up on 8th Avenue around 41st Street. Just a hole in the wall, really, where they, you know, serve bootleg booze. In fact, his granddaughter tells me that the cops would come and shut the place down and throw Poulos and his wife Mary in the tombs for a couple of nights, and then they would get out and they'd just open up another place immediately across the street and go right back to selling booze and playing music. This was far and away his hit. A record that sold well to the immigrant

communities in the US in the 19, teens, 20s, 30s sold a few hundred thousand copies, something like that. A particularly poor seller sells like seven copies or 25 copies or something. It's like an academic book. Yeah, exactly. It's got a limited market, right? This record sold probably tens of thousands of copies and was a 12-inch disc. So it was $1.25 instead of $1.85. It was a luxury item. But practically every Turkish-speaking household in the United States owned a copy of this record.

I personally have had 10 copies over the course of my life. I keep giving them away because they're everywhere. It's extremely common. Sold like hotcakes. Well, then, after this record comes out, Poulos records all this stuff 1930 he just vanishes and so the story circulated for years and years and years that he had been ratted out to immigration services for making a record that was unpatriotic

that was anti-american in some sense and that he'd been deported that's the story that I was told. That's the story I believed for years. Well, no. Turns out he had arthritis and had to stop playing. He winds up moving to Connecticut and going to work for a coffee roaster, which is where he died and is buried.

1970 he died. Incredible. He just disappeared and people didn't know what happened to him. He had just retired from music. Yeah, nobody went looking. Nobody asked the question. His granddaughter, Stacy, who I mentioned, owns all of his diaries in a shoebox under her bed

in old Turkish Ottoman script. And she has so far kept them rather jealously and has not made them available for study yet. We hope that one day this invaluable resource of Poulos's diaries will come to light because it would be a great thing for anybody who's interested in immigration to the U.S. All right, well, we're going to play that mega hit by Pudos and then talk about why maybe people would consider it anti-American. Those people who speculated, why they speculated that he might be considered anti-American. Neden geldim Amerika'ya, neden geldim Amerika'ya? Tutuldum kaldım aman hep, tutuldum kaldım aman hep.

Şimdi bin kere pişmanım, şimdi bin kere pişmanım. Fakat geçti ah ne çarem, fakat geçti ah ne çarem. Aa gelmez olaydım, aa gelmez olaydım. Hep sen işittin Amerika, görmez olaydım. Gelmez olaydım. O, gelmez olaydım, ah görmez olaydım. Tek seni şiirin Amerika görmez olaydım, ölmez ona yürek. Bandırmanım kuşlar izip, bandırmanım göğüsler izip, gemiler dizip, dizip. Gemiler dizip, dizip.

Mehmet'siz insanım yok mu? Netin mahrum gitti seni bildim Açmaz olaydım Açmaz olaydım Aşmaz olaydım Tek senden değil benim amcama Kaçmaz olaydım Aşmaz olaydım Kaçmaz olaydım. Oh, kaçmaz olaydım. Oh, kaçmaz olaydım.

Hep senden silveli bambuluma. Kaçmaz olaydım. Kaçmaz olaydım. Başıma, başıma dolar Başıma dolar part of the appeal of the song is that sense of regret that he makes no bones about. I wish I never came, never saw. Yeah, America looks great off the boat. And then you start running into the cops. And then you start looking for work. And then you get taken advantage of because you don't speak the language or don't know what's going on. And then you start to see what America's made of. It became a rather popular genre of

books in the 1930s and 40s, the narratives of immigrants to the US talking about what America looked like to them. There's a wonderful book by Salome Rizek, which you may know, Syrian Yankee, in which he makes extraordinary observations on the nature of consolidation of power within democracy and capitalism. Really quite a beautiful piece of writing. And maybe you know Anything Can Happen by George Papashvili. Do you know that book? Let me read you a little section of that actually that I have with, because it really describes what's going on in New York at the time. So George Papashvili wrote a memoir called Anything Can Happen, which was an enormously popular thing. It was a bestseller, book of the

month club kind of deal in 1945. He was an immigrant from Georgia, one of the very few in the U.S. at the time, and lived in Manhattan for a period when he first arrived, and describes early on in the book what life was like as an immigrant factory worker at the time. There's one passage in particular that says, but no matter how the work week went, the Sundays were good because then we made all day the holiday and took ourselves to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx where there was country and flowers.

We would make fires and roast cubes, lamb shashliks and walk on the grass and forget the factory. For one day anyway, we could enjoy to live like human beings. From six o'clock onward every Sunday morning, the subway was packed full of Russians, Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, all kinds of people carrying their grandpas and babies and gallon jugs and folding chairs and charcoal sacks and hammocks and samovars and lunch baskets and rugs. Everyone

hurrying to their regular place in the park so they could start tea and lay out, and samovars, and lunch baskets, and rugs, everyone hurrying to their regular place in the park so they could start tea, and lay out lunch, and make the day last a long, long time. So that was it. You know, you're working six days a week for one day where you can live like a human being, and, you know, have some grass under your feet, and, you know, carry your grandpas and your babies in the subway subway and be around people who were well maybe they didn't speak your language exactly but close enough that barbecue picnic culture they share they go going out to the park just something that reminds you of home and this is a big part of what the the meaning of the records are this is a big part of why mg barzakian

went to columbia records and said i think you I think we should be making a record of my band here. The fact of representation matters records just to have them, just as proof that our people also matter here in America. Look, there's a song I know. There's a song from where I come from on a record. The very fact of it matters immensely. Record players were, you know, prohibitively expensive. were prohibitively expensive. Very often, there's a record player in the cafe, and you go in and you pay a quarter or something,

and they'll play you aside. There's a book called The Immigrant's Day in Court, which lays out one particular scam that was being run in the teens. Some grifter put out ads in ethnic newspapers saying, you can buy a gramophone on easy terms, small payments, and I will throw in records in your native language from your homeland. All you got to do is, you know, just fill out this form and send away and we'll bring the record player to your house with the songs of your people wherever you're from right so the scam was guy shows up with a record player in this giant crate it's basically furniture you know it's a big piece of high-tech furniture and is

instructed to collect all of the money immediately which then of course the person doesn't have. And so the company keeps the initial payment and the record player. And in one case, this guy made like millions of dollars over the course of a few years. And when he was caught and taken to court for fraud, he already had like tens of thousands of dollars in a slush fund to cover his legal fees, winds up paying a pittance and gets away with it. That's what America was like. It's incredible. And it's incredible to think that, and this kind of will transition into our next song a bit, that there was so much animosity or fear building towards immigrants as the immigrant population of the U.S. got larger during that period, as if they were the threat when, of course, immigrants who came to the U.S. were disproportionately likely to be victims of such all sorts of things, ranging from grifters

to bureaucratic stuff with the government to stuff at work. They're extremely vulnerable. Well, and I'll point out that some of that is systemic in the sense that there were scientific studies, you may be aware, being done at the time where academics were going to mental hospitals and prisons and doing demographic research and trying to demonstrate that the wave of immigrants that had arrived from the end of the 19th century up to about 1920, that those people were predisposed to criminality and mental illness and that testimony was made before Congress to that extent. And it is that kind of scientific proof

that helped pave the way for the Johnson-Reed Act. Right. That was eugenics. That was America in the 1920s. So you don't wonder why someone would ask, why did I come here at all? I wish I never came when you have to face all that. So let's play this track that actually speaks directly to the experience of immigration quotas, the Johnson-Reed Act you just mentioned. Nishan Moraderos Kaljikian, born July 1886

and died in October of 1962. He arrived to Ellis Island November 13th, 1911 at the age of 25 from present-day Al-Azhar Harput. A lot of Armenians arrived from there, eastern Anatolia. So he joins his brother in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and works first as a barber and then as a surveyor for the city of Medford. It was his career, his whole life. He only recorded about six songs. This one is his own lyrics. I don't know the origin of the melody. Probably he got the melody from somewhere and just plugged in his own words. I don't know the origin of the melody. Probably he got the melody from somewhere and just plugged in his own words. But you can hear at the beginning of each verse the word Amerika. And then periodically through it, you can hear the words melting pot. It is a direct

protest song to the Johnson-Reed Act. And the fact that only 130 Armenians a year were allowed into the US after 1924, the result of which was that families were being kept apart and the scattered Armenians all over the world were not able to be in touch unless they were rather wealthy. So there are very few recordings of Armenians before the Second World War that are in any sense complaints. The vast majority are party songs. This is, in fact, I believe the only protest song in the Armenian language that I have ever heard from that period. All right, the track is called Uske Gukas, meaning where do you come from?

Enjoy this track, and then we'll be back with Ian Nagoski talking about the music of the early Ottoman diaspora in the United States. Stay tuned. Ամերիկային սավդորապած նշանած ես անդին մնած, ¶¶ Ose ket anez ireiz kota, menk ozienk anon korertan, Isto non enke in txalvatan, txavaretak ma nat zinkortan. Isto non enke in txalvatan, txavaretak ma nat zinkortan. I don't know. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 ПЕСНЯ Kvar gjer serramisen er, Farader i rymme sankadat,

Jeg gjer i rymme åkadat, Meg kjenke varg i sin ådat. Jeg gjer i rymme åkadat, Meg kjenke varg i sin ådat. Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Grayton here with Ian Nagoski. We've been listening to these tracks in different languages, early recordings of people who came from the Ottoman Empire, or indeed maybe even were children of people who came from the Ottoman Empire in the United States. And when we started, Ian, you mentioned that some of the first music

that these immigrant communities in the US consumed was actually from the homeland and being sent over, but that a recording industry emerges very quickly and that these diaspora communities, more broadly, are emerging as major factors in sort of increasingly transnational communities that these immigrants are part of. And then during the First World War, you have this big shift where for a lot of these groups, Armenians, Greeks, people from greater Syria, it's an incredibly traumatic period, a catastrophe, displacement. So you have this paradox where the people who are away in the diaspora are actually observing the tragedy of what's going on back home. So let's talk about this recording from 1917 that you've got. It's a recording of a song called Grunk by Zabel Panossian.

that you've got. It's a recording of a song called Grunk by Zabel Panossian. This is a record that's become incredibly important to me personally. I couldn't believe how good it was when I encountered it. And I couldn't believe that I couldn't find anybody who'd ever heard of it. It seemed very strange that something so good would have been so It seemed very strange that something so good would have been so completely forgotten for so long. And I've become obsessed with learning everything I can about the person who made this record. It turns out that it was a massive seller. It was a huge, huge hit. When it was issued in 1917,

it stayed in print continuously until Columbia Records stopped putting out records in the Armenian language in 1931. So well into the Depression, this record kept selling. Probably almost every Armenian household with a gramophone in it had a copy of this record during the 19-teens and 20s. So who is Zabel Pinozian? She was born May 1893 in northwestern Turkey. She immigrates June 7th, 1891 to the U.S., and in April 1896 was married to a photo engraver named Aram Sarkis Penozian, who was 12 years her senior. She lived in Brookline, Massachusetts from about 1908 to about 1920, and sang there as a backup singer with the short-lived Boston Opera Company,

actually behind Tetrazzini, who she seems to have greatly admired. Zabel only recorded about a dozen performances over the course of about 11 months, 1917, 1918. And then she kind of vanishes. For a long time, I couldn't find out what happened. I think part of the problem was that Zabel thought that she was a great artist. I think part of the problem was that Zabel thought that she was a great artist. And the way that Columbia Records released performances in Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, Greek was as part of their E-series for ethnic. They later changed that to the F-series for foreign.

I don't think she saw herself that way. I think she saw herself as a serious artist. During the late teens, she goes on tour all over the U.S. with Armin Akshamaradian, doing performances in benefit for the Near East Relief Fund. And then, in the early 20s, she goes on tour in Europe. And we didn't know much about all that for a long time because she used a different name.

She went under Zabel Aram for about the next 12, 15 years. It's not really clear why, but she's traveling with her daughter who winds up becoming a Spanish dancer and an actress, appears in a 1930s Bob Hope film. And Zabel travels all over the place, Bob Hope film. And Zabel travels all over the place, is quite a famous artist, doesn't make any more records. She had three kids. All three of those kids didn't have kids themselves. So there are no descendants. When I published a piece about Zabel in the Armenian Weekly, I was contacted by a grandnephew who who read the piece remembering his great-aunt, didn't know that she ever had a career as an artist, as a singer, just remembered that she was irascible and a bit difficult to get along with in the family. Anyway, the reason this record was so immensely popular

was that it spoke directly to the conundrum, the problem that Armenians in the U.S. found themselves in, which is that things had gone terribly, terribly, terribly wrong at home, and it was difficult to get news. Didn't know what happened to your family. Didn't know what happened to everyone you ever knew didn't know if you were ever going to get to go home again now you're stranded in the u.s there is nowhere else to go so the song is grunk there are a million grunk songs in armenian means crane and this particular one it turns out is one that zabel herself knew as a child growing up. They're her words, it's her melody, it's her arrangement.

She made that very clear in print. She was a great fan of Gomitasse's and, in fact, went to visit him in Paris and wrote an account of meeting him at the mental asylum. Rather a touching scene, as a matter of fact, where she asked him, Father, is it okay to sing your choral music just by myself? And he said, of course, my daughter, sing it any way you feel it. And yeah, she seemed heartbroken as she left him there.

Grunk is an extraordinary performance, a rather singular piece and something that she performed at practically all of her concerts. It meant a great deal to her and sold like crazy to Armenians who were desperate for news from home. Those are the lyrics. It's asking a a crane hasten not to your flock you'll arrive soon enough tell us any news from home tore people's hearts out yeah

of all the copies of this record I've ever found there's this performance and then there's another one that looks exactly the same same numbers on it same matrix numbers same catalog numbers

same everything but you put the needle on it and it's a numbers same catalog numbers same everything but you put the needle on it and it's a major third higher and it's got little tweety bird sound effects at the beginning and it's not as good and i was like why are there why are there two of these apparently columbia records made so many copies of croonk that they had to go to an alternate take in order to keep the record in print. They probably wore out the stampers for the original. And the take they wound up using was a longer take that was intended for 12-inch release and is 30 seconds longer. So they sped it

up to cram the grooves into the side of a 10-inch disc to keep it in print. So you have to slow the thing down to get it to play at the correct pitch, you know, to get the piano. So if you run into a copy of Grunk and it's got little Tweety Bird sound effects, you have to slow it down. There are two different takes in circulation. Anyway, record nerd stuff. It's incredible stuff. And this particular record that we're about to play uh is a good example of music that sort of is arising out of the musical tradition of armenians well before the first world war but then takes on a new meaning within the context of the war within the context of the genocide uh and sort of has come to mean something

different and much more profound in terms of historical memory for that community within the context of the genocide and sort of has come to mean something different and much more profound in terms of historical memory for that community. Yes, you're exactly right. You make a really good point there that it's a song that preceded the genocide and then took on new meaning in the years following. And then, isn't it interesting also

that it was then left behind? That you get a generation or two later and nobody remembers the song or the record. Nobody talks about it. Nobody's looked into it. No Armenian ever wrote anything about Zabel Pinozian in a hundred years? I hear a lot of interesting questions about that, I think. One of which has to do with the nature of immigration to America and the demands that America makes on immigrants to assimilate. And the need to be American first.

So a child whose grandparents were of Zabel's generation and were raised in a household that spoke some Armenian or Turkish or something, and maybe went to Armenian school on Saturday when Grandma and Grandpa die and their records are sitting around in the attic, what do you do with them? What do they mean to you as a grandchild, as a great grandchild? Are they interesting or important? Maybe you don't have a machine to play them on anymore.

Maybe you barely remember them ever being played when you were young. And if you do remember them, is it a good memory or is it a little embarrassing? Because it's so not American. It's very old world. It's a part of you that the kids in school didn't celebrate. If you had to dress up and do those dances at the church, you know, to keep your immigrant status with your family, that was stuff that you hid from the kids in school, you know. So then what do you do with the records? We've all seen Antiques Roadshow. So we know there are antiques.

And some of these things, these old records, people want them, right? So you go and you find yourself a record collector. You find one of these nerds, guy that smells like cigarettes and hot dogs and is into this weird old music, right? So you find one of these guys and you bring him this Zabel Pinozian record or whatever it is that's in the attic or the basement. And he looks at it. And he goes, I don't collect foreign. It's actually a line from the movie Ghost World, where there's a 78 collector character.

I don't collect foreign. Nobody collects foreign. People want blues records and jazz records and country records. America didn't want Zabel Pinozian either. We had no interest in saving her and her story. That voice was not helpful to understanding us as Americans

for a real long time. Well, it seems like a shame. It's a good record. Yeah, and so now we're going to play that track for our listeners that had a nice thorough setup and thank you thank you for that ian uh and then we're going to play another track that might be in a similar vein uh so stay tuned Mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare, mare © BF-WATCH TV 2021 A breeze of my journey Me and my favorite

You're all I'll ever need You don't have to leave But I do May I turn in A bris machiuni. Oh, oh, oh. Fabric maturit A lunga plis, garum pera estare Oh, © BF-WATCH TV 2021 But you © BF-WATCH TV 2021 O, arsage pati na mire, O deus mi, si benito. I love you. © transcript Emily Beynon 🎵🎵🎵 🎵🎵🎵 S'azmisi p'ni sovo, Chiasu, Maria, chiasu leo, Metin glititi sova, I say

I say I say I say I say I say I say I say I say И там... Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Grayton here with Ian Naguski. We just heard two songs.

The first one, which we had a nice story for, Zabal Panosian's Grunk. And the last one we just heard is a song that's called a Smirneiko Minore, I Do Not Know Greek. But I know that that's something to do with Izmir and it's a sad song and it might, on its surface, have something to do with the tragedy that befalls Izmir

after the First World War, the destruction of Izmir and the destruction of the greek community of ismere turns out that's not the case right no um that record was made uh july 1919 um and in fact she had recorded it about six months earlier in 1918 no it's just a minor key song in the Smyrna style. It's a kind of song very close to the gazelles and things that are enormously popular through the Eastern Mediterranean in a bunch of different languages. Marika was Greek. She's from Kos. I think she probably traveled around the Eastern Mediterranean quite a bit. She seems to have an enormous repertoire. She records 250 songs between 1918 and 1929. In fact, her very first recordings were made in Alexandria,

Egypt, end of 1914, beginning of 1915. And then she and her husband, Constantinos, Gustus, Gus, he was called in America, immigrate through Ellis Island, and they travel around the U.S. First instance we have of her in the U.S. is at a patriotic Hellenic conference in Pittsburgh in 1916 or 1917. And then by 1918, they're settled in New York on 41st Street, and she begins recording first for Victor Records and then for Columbia Records, and records prolifically for both labels for a decade. They open a little nightclub there called Marika's, which is very, very successful apparently, and really set the stage for a scene of nightclubs that wound up sprouting up in that area over the next few decades. But during her

career, she was actively attempting to Americanize and hybridize the music that she knew and loved. She recorded a bunch of material accompanied by Nat Shilkrit's orchestra, which was a pop band at the time. Nat Shilkrit later won a couple of Grammys for his work on Showboat, the musical. But she's remembered for the material that she recorded with her quartet. And it's significant in particular that she has on almost all of those sides a guy named Marcos Sifnios

who plays cello and harmony, counterpoint, which did not exist in any other Greek performers at the time. So it's musically innovative to have a second harmonic line going in the music. She was an extraordinary person. There were other Greek women who were already stars in the U.S. Around the corner, there's a woman named Kula Antonopoulou, Madame Kula, who had her own little record label, Panhellenion, and was recording prolifically artists in Greek and Turkish. But Kula Amalia Bakas, who was a friend of Marika's and Roman Yote and the other

Greek women who were around all performed some chef to Chelly stuff some belly dance stuff they'd get it shake it for the boys you know nine Greek men for every one Greek woman in New York at the time. You know, the immigrants are coming to make money and go home with the money. And there's not a lot of ideas about like having a family. So these immigrant men, you know, they get a little money in their pocket. It's nice to go sit somewhere where you can watch a woman sing and dance and stuff that you remember from home, you know? It feels good. You're willing to pay a few bucks for that right all of these women amalia kula you know they're they're shaking it a

little bit marika never does not once there are no traces of belly dance stuff on any of her records. She only sings songs of love, patriotism, and becoming American. And she becomes a big star. And then the Depression hits 1929, ends her career. That's it. No more Marika Papageka on record.

She and her husband move out to a farming community on Staten Island, where she dies at home. 1942. She was 52 years old. Lived the American dream and died on an island far, far from the island where she was born and raised. Incredible story. And it's taken us into a new uh space we've played a couple heavy songs and had a couple heavy stories but we want to switch it up do something a little more light we're going to play a song in armenian called sude sude so it's all a lie um and talk more about uh nightlife nightclubs new york city and uh the ottoman and post-ottoman uh diaspora in the united states and their music. So stay tuned. Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok Հայց աշխարից մեջ դեպ կվայեր եմ, հոսկիչի խավթիկ, սերիչի հավադար, այս աշխարից մեջ համեն պանի այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար այդ համար ա� սերի չի հավադար, այս աշխարիս մեն, ամեն պանսուդ էն, սուդ է, սուդ է, սուդ է, ամեն պանսուդ էն, այս աշխարիս մեն, ամեն պանսուդ էն։ امم پنسوده ایسا شواریش من امم پنسوده

میانی مکفانی خواهد آتک دو گره خرمه چک Միայն մեկպանին հավադացեք դով երեխ հմեցեք, հես վայել եսեք, հոչքի չի խասկիկ, չերի չի հավադաք, այս աշխարից մեզ ամեն պանց ուդե։ Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok © BF-WATCH TV 2021 I have a good friend named Harry Kazilian, who's a music researcher, runs a blog called Keftime USA. Harry's been a great, great help in translating and helping me learn about some of the stuff I'm interested in. And when I got interested in that performer, in Edward Boghossian, Harry was really surprised. Really? That guy? Why? He's not a very good singer, you know? I said, well, yeah, well, you know, I like the Ramones better than I like Led Zeppelin. So Boghossian's a rocker. And no no he's not the greatest singer on earth but he never

that wasn't the point of edward boghossian boghossian was a comedian he was a party guy uh he was born 1900 in istanbul his father was a actor and a theater teacher so he really grew up on the stage uh was performing professionally by his teens. Comes to the U.S. by about 1920, starts recording for Pharos Records on 3rd Avenue, which was run out of the Vartasian Brothers watch and jewelry repair shop. And they had this little record label. In fact, they bought M.G. Parzekian's masters and kept all of those in print during the late 20s, and released some other stuff, including the first records of Edward Boghossian. Boghossian travels prolifically in theater troupes, performing plays. He did his own

translation of Arshin Malalan, very famous, kind of operetta, I think from Georgia. It's a story about a rich man who pretends to be poor in order to get somebody to fall in love with him, that kind of thing. Enormously popular play and was performed all over the US for Armenian, Greek, and Turkish speaking audiences. So he's a comedian and he's also a picnic guy. He's a sort of drunk uncle type who would get up and jam and sing these sort of blue humor songs about people exploiting each other, immigration, playing poker, being lazy, getting drunk, you know, kind of off-color party jams. And he was beloved. He had a long and very successful career. But Sode Sode was by far his hit.

It's his own lyrics. And it was recorded so many times by so many people that, as my friend Harry says, it's sort of the Armenian equivalent of Havana Gila. It's something that Harry just has to put up with at family functions. Never even occurred to him where it came from or who the original person was but it was it was Boghossian he's accompanied there by a band from Philadelphia who kept the song going for a long time and the song as you pointed out to me is you know still played all over the place yeah absolutely I immediately recognized it from records that I had found in Turkey, in Armenian, not knowing much about the history. I was like, oh, this is some Armenian party music,

maybe wedding music or music for the tavern or what have you. Indeed, the one I found was performed by a very famous Armenian sort of tavern singer, indeed the king of the tavern, Heiko. What's interesting with that was that you had these 45s in armenian that were being sold in turkey uh but then on his lp all the tracks are in turkish so they actually translated sude sude into uh turkish it's a song with and they translated it pretty literally it's called her shea yalan everything is a lie so it's kind of fascinating the afterlife of this song that makes it back to turkey where there's still a pretty sizable armenian community to this day yeah so let's play one more of these

songs in the more racy fun-loving genre from the period set it up for us so stock market crash 1929 the ethnic recording business in america grinds to a halt almost no records in greek turkish armenian arabic get made in the u.s for about a decade 1931 to 42 just dead a lot of people's careers just end A lot of people just don't make any records. 42, recording starts again. Things have changed. People have gotten older. A lot of the same generation of people who were recording in the 1920s are now middle-aged and are now seasoned veterans and frankly have lived their lives at night. You know, they've just been out in the clubs. They've just been, you know, an oud in one hand and a glass of wine and a cigarette in the other five, six, seven nights a week for decades, right?

Hard partying people. And up around where Marika's club had been 41st and 8th Avenue there's a bunch of restaurants some record stores and nightclubs start opening the Egyptian gardens the Britannia it's like a strip of about seven eight blocks where there are these oriental nightclubs as they were referred to where during the 30s and 40s, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Armenian-speaking people would go get dressed, party, have a few drinks, listen to some music, throw some money at some dancers, that kind of thing. Fun times. And there are certain musicians who are real staples of that scene. One of them is a violinist who is Bulgarian named Nick Donov. Another is a nude player, an Armenian guy who immigrated with Achilles Poulos named Marco Malcone. Donov and

Malcone become the de facto house band for a small circle of independent record labels that start up in the early mid-1940s and then run through the 50s. Metropolitan, Califon, Mayrae, and Balkan records. There's kind of shared ownership within and among that little circle of labels. Boghossian, who we just listened to, recorded all of his stuff in the 1940s for Metropolitan, and Doniff and Malcone accompany him on some of that stuff this is another uh individual who's accompanied by donif and melcone who was somebody who had been around in the 1930s and 40s it's hard to tell exactly how old she is matter of fact i i'm guessing she's probably about marika's age i'm guessing she's probably born around 1895 something something like that. She's rather middle-aged, I think,

by the time she makes any records in the 1940s. Her name is Virginia Magidoo. And for a long time, I went around playing Virginia Magidoo records, telling people we'll never know who Virginia Magidoo is. I was convinced that she was one of these cyphers, like Mary Steele. She doesn't appear in any public records. I figured it was a stage name, and that she was just a dead end. But then, just like two months ago, I found out that there's five hours of interviews with a Greek accordion player named John Giannos, who had been in New York and played in this scene on Up and Down 8th Avenue. And Steve Frangos recorded in the 1980s a bunch of interviews with this accordion player, Giannaros.

And there's like five, six, seven minutes where Giannaros talks about Virginia Magidou. He knew her and loved her as a person. Like, he really, enormous respect. He said that she was the best singer in the Turkish language in the U.S. Now, she only made two sides in Turkish. All of the other sides that she ever recorded were in Greek. He also talked a little bit about her life. She was married twice to sailors. It's not clear how much her husbands were even around.

He said that she was still alive, but she was very, very sick, had gone blind, and then began to tell the story of how she went blind by illustrating a story of a recording session. He said that they went one time to record. The engineer brought two gallons of oujo. And the first thing Virginia did was drank a gallon by herself. And the engineer goes, Virginia, aren't you going to leave any for the rest of us? And she said, I left you a gallon. But she couldn't record a note until she had a gallon of Ujo in her. Virginia, she was a partier.

She seems like an extraordinary person. And she recorded a lot of real rough and ready kind of stuff. There's a great song of hers called I Was Born a Badass Chick, which is a cover of a Rose Eskenazi song. She recorded songs about, yeah, good times and hard living. And this one in particular is a song about having to deal with Greek men who are more interested in American girls than they are in Greek girls. The translation of the title you got here is Saucy American Girls.

Saucy American Girls. All right, enjoy. they are in greek girls yeah and the translation of the title you got here is saucy american girls all right enjoy Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE Μόνο με με την Αμερικάννα Αυτή μου πήρε τα μυαλά πεντά μόρφη σουλτάννα Πάσε πια τα αλγαδάκια που έχεις με τα σιωπεράκια Πάσε πια τα αλγαδάκια με τα έμορφα ναυτάκια مطای مرفا نفتا کیا Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE Yes, Virginia. Virginia. Κακπίν Αμερικανά μου, έλα στα νοϊκά σου Κακπίν Αμερικανά μου, έλα στα νοϊκά σου Και μη μου κάνεις και γινόχωλια στη γειτονιά σου Πάξε πια τα νταλγαδάκια, πόθεις με τα σοφεράκια Πάξε πια τα δάλγα δάκια, με τα έμορφα ναυτάκια Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Grayton here.

I've been talking to Ian Nagoski, and we've heard some of his favorite songs, old 78 RPM records from the early Ottoman diaspora. If you want to get more of this type of stuff, we've got the track list, we've got the names of the singers, we've got a link to Ian Nagoski's Canary Records label on Bandcamp, where you can get some of the tracks for yourselves if you like. There's lots more we can talk about, but we thought we'd end with just like one more track that's got a great story to it.

A song by a particularly remarkable individual from sort of the tail end of that late Ottoman diaspora? Well, I just wanted to share a beautiful record that I happened to encounter by a guy named James K. Sutherland. I went looking for who in the world James K. Sutherland was, who had apparently self-released a double LP of Oud Taxims in Flint, Michigan, sometime in the 1960s. I didn't really find much. But a music researcher friend in the Netherlands

had mentioned him in the footnotes of some work that he had done on the great Cemil Bey. It turns out James K. Sutherland had corresponded with Chimil Bay's son. What in the world? What's a guy in Flint, Michigan doing corresponding with Chimil Bay's son about details of toxin performance and self-releasing it? Well, it turns out that not only did he self-release this double LP of Uttoxians, he also self-published an autobiography, which is called Adventures of an Armenian Boy. So we're lucky to have the kind of life story of this guy. He was born Hagop Lutfi Sarkezyan, third child of parents from Aleppo, Syria, who were fleeing the Hamadian

massacres in the 1890s, six months before his birth. His parents bought an organ for the family home, and he studied organ. He studied oud. 1913 to 1915, he studies at Antibes College, but August 1915, his family averted deportation and potential death by traveling on foot and arriving by higher carriage to Aleppo as unwelcome immigrants, he wrote in his autobiography. So his family struggles to survive and witnesses the starvation and abuse of people around them. While he's a teenager and he narrowly gets through with typhus fever, continues to study both medicine and music until March 5th, 1920,

when he leaves his whole family behind there in Aleppo, goes to Beirut, sails from there to Marseille, and from there, April 11, 1920, arrives at Providence, Rhode Island. He was carrying his oud with him, and the customs official said that he had to pay duty on the oud to bring it in unless he could play it. And so,

20-odd years old, he takes the oud out of its bag and plays My Country, Tis of Thee, and was therefore allowed to bring the instrument without paying tax. He then goes to Watertown, where he has family, and then winds up in Iowa City, which he says, which I love so much now, and was a fearsome torture chamber at the time. He attends school while working menial jobs, lawn mowing, dishwashing, completes his pre-medical degree September 1922 and his medical degree June 1926. He said it was a common saying at the time, I'm 200% American, I hate everyone. So he changes his

name from Sarkeesian to Sutherland. And in his autobiography, he says it's his only regret of his entire life that he did that. Winds up getting married, a bunch of kids, very successful career as a cardiologist in Flint, Michigan. Lifelong Democrat, becomes a coroner, and then runs for various offices, a big FDR guy. Winds up being an art collector, buys a 1649 Stradivarius, writes an article for The Strad Magazine, a magazine for Stradivarius collectors in which he bemoans the fact that Middle Eastern music is not well known or loved among Western musicians. And late in life, tries to leave behind a legacy.

Self-publishes this extraordinary book. I mean, beautifully written, yes. Profusely illustrated. On the most amazing paper. With gilt edges, beveled boards, signed numbered edition. With scales and details and maps and this elaborate document he's trying to leave behind, as well as this record that he was trying to show what he could do on the Oud. And if it hadn't turned up in a basement, well, I don't know.

It's such a good record and he's such a good player seems like it's worth sharing and we're very grateful for you giving us the opportunity to share this story and this record with our audience Ian Nagoski thank you for coming on the podcast thanks for having me

it's been quite a pleasure and I wish we could do many more hours of this conversation and great music from the Ottoman diaspora, but we're going to leave it at that. I want to remind our listeners to check out our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, for supplementary materials for this episode, and to join us next time in another installment of Ottoman History Podcast.

The track we're leaving you with is Huseyni Ashran Dance and Taksim by Dr. James K. Sutherland. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan, arrannan موسیقی در موسیقی درسته Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, nene, Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021