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Speaker 1: A federal as a protection of my heart radio. The

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Speaker 1: history of American music in twelve seconds, things that related

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Speaker 1: directly to what we created as Americans, that led up

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Speaker 1: to our greatest musical contributions to the world. Old jazz,

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Speaker 1: old blues, old gospel, old country, that's kind of America.

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Speaker 1: That's one narrative, but the full story, like America itself,

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Speaker 1: it's much more complicated. And Ian Nagaski has something he'd

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Speaker 1: like to add. My name is Ian Nagaski. I'm a

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Speaker 1: music researcher and record producer near Baltimore, Maryland. A little

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Speaker 1: bit more than a decade now, I've been doing reissue

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Speaker 1: records of old stuff and languages that I don't speak.

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Speaker 1: Through his label, Canary Records, Ian has reissued all kinds

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Speaker 1: of forgotten treasures, early American gospel, untraceable East Asian pop songs,

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Speaker 1: recordings of wild birds, works that were almost forgotten. Some

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Speaker 1: stuff he's literally pulled out of garbage cans. But of

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Speaker 1: all of his projects, one is the pre eminent focus

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Speaker 1: songs of Near and Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States,

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Speaker 1: what I've been calling Ottoman diaspora music Ottoman as in

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Speaker 1: the Ottoman Empire, which, like the Soviet Union, is an

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Speaker 1: entity that no longer exists, but exerted a powerful force

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Speaker 1: on the tides of history. Disclaimer, Well, I have to

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Speaker 1: say that I'm not a an Ottomanist historian and academic

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Speaker 1: or anything like that. There's a lot that you could

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Speaker 1: get wrong. It's like saying, so what was ancient Rome?

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Speaker 1: But the Ottoman Empire roughly was a huge swath of

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Speaker 1: territory that expanded and contracted over about five hundred years,

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Speaker 1: following the Byzantine Empire, which had succeeded the Roman Empire.

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Speaker 1: It was founded by Turks, Turkic people from Central Asia

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Speaker 1: who had migrated into what is present day Turkey Anatolia.

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Speaker 1: They wound up conquering all of Anatolia, then conquered upward

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Speaker 1: through almost all the Balkans up to the Danube River.

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Speaker 1: In Mozart's grandparents time, they were knocking on the doorstep

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Speaker 1: of the Austro Hungarian Empire. The Ottoman Empire then extended

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Speaker 1: eastward all the way to Persia, southward along the Red

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Speaker 1: Sea on both sides Egypt, down to Yemen, and then

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Speaker 1: across almost all of North Africa. So a huge swath

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Speaker 1: of of the world around the Mediterranean and what's now

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Speaker 1: the Middle East, and it continued for about five hundred years.

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Speaker 1: Starting in the early mid nineteenth century, territory started falling

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Speaker 1: away pretty fast. Greece want its independence, and then more

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Speaker 1: and more territories begin to secede, and the ethnic minorities

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Speaker 1: are rising up in various ways. They're become huge military

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Speaker 1: problems for the Empire, with the Russian Empire bearing down

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Speaker 1: from the north. The First World War happens, there are

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Speaker 1: a series of coups, there are huge financial debts, and

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Speaker 1: the Empire finally comes apart shortly after the First World

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Speaker 1: War and becomes now what is just the present day

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Speaker 1: Republic of Turkey and a number of other countries, Syria, Bulgaria,

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Speaker 1: lots of places were Ottoman for a very long time.

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Speaker 1: You might think you've never heard music from this distant land,

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Speaker 1: or that if you had, you certainly couldn't hum a

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Speaker 1: few bars of it, But you'd be wrong. The first

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Speaker 1: commercial recordings in the Turkish language occur under the ages

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Speaker 1: of mg Prozekian ve but first recordings in Turkish and

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Speaker 1: Arabic in the US generally occur at the Chicago World's

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Speaker 1: Face in at that World's Fair. There were a number

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Speaker 1: of pavilions. There was a Turkish pavilion and a Egyptian pavilion,

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Speaker 1: and a Moroccan pavilion, for instance, so that people in

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Speaker 1: Chicago could experience these cultures, and there were continuous performances

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Speaker 1: of musicians and dancers. But the breakout hit from the

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Speaker 1: Egyptian pavilion was a song that actually everybody in America

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Speaker 1: probably knows, which is called The Streets of Cairo. Was

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Speaker 1: written in New York by I believe Saul Bloom, Jewish

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Speaker 1: Tim Penalty kind of songwriter, and everybody knows it because

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Speaker 1: it goes dad, there's a place in France where the

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Speaker 1: naked ladies dance, there's a hole in the wall where

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Speaker 1: the boys can see at all. There just some variation

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Speaker 1: of those lyrics that it's probably most everybody learned on

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Speaker 1: the school playground at some point, but that's where the

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Speaker 1: melody comes from. It was the breakout hit of the

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Speaker 1: turk An Egyptian pavilions at the World's Fair and was

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Speaker 1: what was danced to what was then referred to as

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Speaker 1: the Hoochie Coochie dance. By this dance a little egypt

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Speaker 1: the hoochie coochie dance being what we now call belly dancing,

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Speaker 1: and wound up becoming shorthand for the entirety of the

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Speaker 1: Middle East. Just a few bars of reference of that

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Speaker 1: in a cartoon means it's from the Middle East somewhere.

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Speaker 1: But the song itself, apparently Bloom may have lifted or

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Speaker 1: plagiarized a song that was probably goes back to Algeria,

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Speaker 1: but that's how it winds up coming into the American vernacular,

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Speaker 1: and that was what Americans knew about Middle Eastern music

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Speaker 1: for a long time. In an age of mass migration,

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Speaker 1: the Statue of Liberty and Golden gate Bridge became global

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Speaker 1: beacons to folks searching for a new home. So as

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Speaker 1: with immigrants from almost every other part of the world

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Speaker 1: who were having the end of the nineteenth century beginning

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Speaker 1: of the twentieth century from all over the place. People

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Speaker 1: are are being driven by, you know, financial hope, the

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Speaker 1: image of itself that America broadcast to the world as

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Speaker 1: a land of possibility. Meanwhile, back home, several other things

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Speaker 1: are happening. Greece has serious financial trouble. The current crop fails,

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Speaker 1: and there's just not a lot of money circulating around.

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Speaker 1: So a young Greek man at the end of the

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Speaker 1: nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth century, in order to

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Speaker 1: get married, needs some money. The place to go to

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Speaker 1: get that money is the United States. Now that's a

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Speaker 1: Greek Man in Greece, a Greek Man in present day

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Speaker 1: Turkey and Anatolia, of which there were tens hundreds of thousands.

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Speaker 1: There was another concern, which is that as an Ottoman subject, previously,

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Speaker 1: as non Muslims, as ethnic minorities, they had not been

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Speaker 1: required to perform military service. Ottoman law change and there

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Speaker 1: was forced conscription of the ethnic minorities. Lots of young

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Speaker 1: Christian and Jewish men thought to themselves, no, absolutely not.

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Speaker 1: There is no way that we, having been second class

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Speaker 1: citizens in particular four hundreds of years, are going to

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Speaker 1: go fight your wars for you. It's out of the question.

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Speaker 1: And so a lot of what happened was simply fleeing

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Speaker 1: military conscription. So that's another thing. Then there are these

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Speaker 1: conflicts at the end of the nineteenth century between the

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Speaker 1: Ottoman military and the ethnic minorities, in particular with Armenians.

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Speaker 1: There's a series of massacres that occur the end of

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Speaker 1: the nineteenth century where Armenians begin to get the idea

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Speaker 1: that it is no longer tenable to remain under the

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Speaker 1: Ottoman regime because thousands and thousands of people were being

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Speaker 1: slaughtered by the military. So the Hammadian massacres as they're

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Speaker 1: referred to, drove a lot of Armenians in particular out

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Speaker 1: of the country. So then once you have a certain

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Speaker 1: baseline number of immigrants in the United States from a

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Speaker 1: certain location, they begin building communities actively trying to bring

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Speaker 1: over more people. End of the nineteenth the beginning of

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Speaker 1: the twenteth century is this massive wave of immigration from

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Speaker 1: all over the place. Around New York City, a thousand

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Speaker 1: human beings a day, we're entering just through Ellis Island.

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Speaker 1: In one city in America, a thousand people a day

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Speaker 1: are coming in and true to form a new population

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Speaker 1: in America meant a new audience to sell stuff too.

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Speaker 1: The record companies, particularly the two big record companies Victor

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Speaker 1: Records later became our Cia later became BMG later became Sony,

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Speaker 1: and Columbia Records later became Sony. Two burgeoning record company.

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Speaker 1: These that are just growing exponentially year by year, are

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Speaker 1: looking at all of this growth and going like, hey,

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Speaker 1: I wonder if they buy any records. I wonder if

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Speaker 1: we can sell them some stuff, you know. So they

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Speaker 1: start trying to market records to the immigrants, and it

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Speaker 1: works pretty quick. The first way that it works is

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Speaker 1: to get material that was recorded by sister companies overseas

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Speaker 1: and marketed to the immigrants. That works. Then the record

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Speaker 1: companies A and R men would try to scout out

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Speaker 1: what they thought were talented people that the immigrants would

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Speaker 1: want to hear. Because the record company exects think they

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Speaker 1: know best. They think they know what people would want

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Speaker 1: to hear, and it tends to be aspiring, classy kind

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Speaker 1: of music. The people don't buy that stuff so much.

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Speaker 1: What the immigrants mostly want to hear, as it turns out,

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Speaker 1: is funky, down home stuff, stuff that reminds them of

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Speaker 1: good times and parties and you know, the village, and

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Speaker 1: songs that are nostalgic and important to them from where

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Speaker 1: they came from. The record companies finally get it through

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Speaker 1: their heads. They finally start to realize what we really

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Speaker 1: need to do here is go into the communities and ask,

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Speaker 1: do you know anybody who plays like back Home? And

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Speaker 1: that stuff starts being recorded in the Manhattan Recording studios

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Speaker 1: late team's early twenties, and the people are buying it,

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Speaker 1: the companies are making money, and for a while, everybody's happy.

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Speaker 1: The first record ever made for an Arabic speaking population

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Speaker 1: in the United States was a recording for Victor Records

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Speaker 1: from by a guy named Alexander meldoeuf Malouf had already

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Speaker 1: published a couple of pieces as sheet music, but he

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Speaker 1: makes a couple of sides for Victor. One is called

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Speaker 1: a Trip to Syria and the other is a performance

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Speaker 1: called El Jazi Year, a song that is still played

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Speaker 1: in Turkey and Syria. Actually, it's a very popular melody

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Speaker 1: and seems to refer to military campaigns of the Ottoman

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Speaker 1: Empire in Northwest Africa. And he's playing in a style

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Speaker 1: that we recognize as being not dissimilar from ragtime or

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Speaker 1: for that matter, Debucy and French impressionists. He was second generation,

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Speaker 1: He was born in the US, and his entire career

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Speaker 1: is marked to a great extent by this assimilation, this

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Speaker 1: hybridization process, making a music that is authentic to himself

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Speaker 1: as both an American as a Syrian person. After he

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Speaker 1: makes this record, he winds up starting his own record

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Speaker 1: label and aloof records, which functioned out of Washington Street

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Speaker 1: in uh downtown Manhattan what's now Tribeca. There was a

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Speaker 1: strip of Washington that was called Little Syria for decades,

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Speaker 1: and that's where all the Arabic speaking people in Manhattan

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Speaker 1: kind of were clustered together and had stores. Malouf's record

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Speaker 1: label was not actually the only record label on that street.

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Speaker 1: There was another guy, a J. Mac Sud, who was

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Speaker 1: a copt from Egypt who had his own record label

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Speaker 1: and put out superb wonderful, beautiful sounding and looking discs

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Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties. One of the kind of main

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Speaker 1: musical denizens of Little Syria is an extraordinary violinist guy

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Speaker 1: who recorded for a bunch of stuff in the mid

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Speaker 1: teens for Colombia and then winds up going and recording

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Speaker 1: as an accompanist on a whole bunch of stuff for

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Speaker 1: a J. Mac SuDS label. He was a guy born

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Speaker 1: a Lepo named dim Caricom. By the end of his

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Speaker 1: life he winds up connecting with a guy named Ahmed

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Speaker 1: Abdul Melik, a bass player and a jazz musician. He

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Speaker 1: was for a long time, including through most of the fifties,

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Speaker 1: bass player fourth Looneous monk Ahmad Abdul Melik gets this

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Speaker 1: idea in his head that he wants to create a

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Speaker 1: hybridized Near Eastern Jazz us. I'm an Abdomelique hires Naine Carracan,

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Speaker 1: who's at this point well into his sixties, to record

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Speaker 1: on a record in Night m his last performance on

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Speaker 1: record absolutely tearing it up on violin in the same

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Speaker 1: way he did when he first starts recording fourteen for Columbia.

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Speaker 1: Before coming to America, Nain Caracand may have studied with

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Speaker 1: the father and teacher of one of his Syrian contemporaries,

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Speaker 1: Samuel Chawa. Samuel Chawa was the most important violinist of

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Speaker 1: the entire Arab world during the teens and twenties, and

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Speaker 1: he's still well remembered. There's a big retrospective box set

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Speaker 1: that came out recently of of Samuel Chawa. Samuel Chawa's

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Speaker 1: repertoire is almost identical to Naim Carracans like their style

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Speaker 1: and the actual tunes they play and the way they

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Speaker 1: play them are very very close. But the Arab world

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Speaker 1: remembers Samuel Chawa. Nobody remembers Naim Carracan. Maybe the worst

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Speaker 1: thing Naim Carracan could have done, for the sake of posterity,

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Speaker 1: for the sake of the memory of of his talent,

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Speaker 1: was moved to the US. If he had just gone

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Speaker 1: to Beyrout or Cairo instead, there might be books on

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Speaker 1: Naim Carracan, there might be seedy box set retrospectives. He

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Speaker 1: went to a place that would never appreciate him. As

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Speaker 1: the teens in twenties progressed on, immigrant artists were proving

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Speaker 1: to be good business, but at the major labels, a

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Speaker 1: xenophobic sentiment dictated the way these records were being branded.

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Speaker 1: The record companies start up series in their catalogs. Columbia

218
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Speaker 1: Records starts an E series for ethnic. They later change

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Speaker 1: it to the F series for foreign. Just as they

220
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Speaker 1: had a series of what we're called Race Records, which

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Speaker 1: were records they were marketing to black folks. Anybody who's

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Speaker 1: speaking of foreign language, who isn't playing Western classical art

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Speaker 1: music gets stuck within those catalogs within that series, no

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Speaker 1: matter whether they're playing some kind of like rural hillbilly

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Speaker 1: music or whether they're classically trained rich person singing some

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Speaker 1: fancy art music. Columbia and Victor have no idea which

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Speaker 1: is which basically, it's all just ethnic or foreign. Much

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Speaker 1: of the material for these catalogs was produced at Columbia's

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Speaker 1: New York studio inside the Woolworth Building on Broadway. It

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Speaker 1: was at the time the tallest building in the United States.

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Speaker 1: Musicians could get in the elevator and go up to

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Speaker 1: the recording studio, I believe on the thirteen floor. It

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Speaker 1: must have been very intense. The recording engineers had a

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Speaker 1: system where they would show you a colored card or

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Speaker 1: a colored light to tell you when to begin. They

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Speaker 1: would show you another colored card or another colored light

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Speaker 1: to tell you when you had thirty seconds left to

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Speaker 1: wrap it up for the end of the side, and

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00:17:33,880 --> 00:17:36,439
Speaker 1: then the color changes once again. And that's the end

240
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Speaker 1: of the side. Because you can only fit about three

241
00:17:39,680 --> 00:17:43,359
Speaker 1: minutes and thirty seconds tops onto a side of a disk,

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Speaker 1: that's it. So you have to have pre rehearsed and

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00:17:47,080 --> 00:17:49,600
Speaker 1: timed out the piece. Now you know a lot of

244
00:17:49,600 --> 00:17:55,960
Speaker 1: these performers would play a piece for seven, eight twenty minutes. Yeah,

245
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Speaker 1: a lot of these people who are playing dance songs.

246
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Speaker 1: You know, this is party stuff. Or maybe there were

247
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Speaker 1: extra verses. You know, maybe the song goes on for

248
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Speaker 1: you know, six minutes, but you got three and a half.

249
00:18:08,680 --> 00:18:10,640
Speaker 1: Do it or don't, and so you have to tie

250
00:18:10,640 --> 00:18:13,560
Speaker 1: out your performance beforehand and show up at the recording

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Speaker 1: studio ready to do it. Immigrant performers were generally given

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Speaker 1: one take and that was it. Mariko papagicas Smerneco was

253
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Speaker 1: recorded in July in that building. The Papagica record is

254
00:18:39,920 --> 00:18:45,040
Speaker 1: extraordinary because she took three takes to do it, very

255
00:18:45,160 --> 00:18:48,480
Speaker 1: very unusual. I don't know how or why that happened,

256
00:18:49,040 --> 00:18:51,680
Speaker 1: but it certainly paid off. When you hear that first

257
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Speaker 1: note that she sings, that doesn't come from nowhere, That's

258
00:18:56,160 --> 00:19:46,120
Speaker 1: a note that somebody worked on a Why the company

259
00:19:46,200 --> 00:19:48,960
Speaker 1: let her try it over and over, we don't know.

260
00:19:49,440 --> 00:19:51,879
Speaker 1: Because everything else she recorded that day she recorded in

261
00:19:51,920 --> 00:19:57,560
Speaker 1: one take. She did record the same piece seven months

262
00:19:57,560 --> 00:20:01,719
Speaker 1: earlier for Victor Records a few blocks away. That record

263
00:20:01,760 --> 00:20:06,280
Speaker 1: actually sold better, circulated more, and copies of that are

264
00:20:06,800 --> 00:20:09,879
Speaker 1: are available a little bit, but they're not as good.

265
00:20:10,720 --> 00:20:15,359
Speaker 1: Same performance, exact, same arrangement. Everybody plays exactly the same

266
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Speaker 1: note at the same time, but it doesn't have the thing.

267
00:20:19,800 --> 00:20:23,600
Speaker 1: It doesn't have the Fire that Columbia version that she

268
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Speaker 1: did July, of which, to the best of my knowledge,

269
00:20:27,720 --> 00:20:33,600
Speaker 1: less than five copies exist now of that record. It

270
00:20:33,680 --> 00:21:26,919
Speaker 1: did not sell. Mario Papagico was somebody who overtly attempted

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00:21:27,040 --> 00:21:31,600
Speaker 1: to cross over into kind of like a hybridized mainstream

272
00:21:31,640 --> 00:21:36,000
Speaker 1: Americanized style, and she recorded a bunch of material not

273
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Speaker 1: with a traditional Turkish or Greek style band, but with

274
00:21:41,320 --> 00:21:46,239
Speaker 1: pop orchestra, including some stuff that mentions like having your

275
00:21:46,280 --> 00:21:50,440
Speaker 1: hair bobbed or iron in your hair, you know, americanized things,

276
00:21:50,560 --> 00:21:55,960
Speaker 1: cars and electricity, stuff that was new for immigrants. She

277
00:21:56,080 --> 00:22:00,040
Speaker 1: was actively attempting to appeal to an American eye, a

278
00:22:00,160 --> 00:22:05,719
Speaker 1: sense among Greeks, a sense of being assimilated into American culture.

279
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Speaker 1: One of the people that she was involved with was

280
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Speaker 1: a record producer at Victor Records. He ran there Foreign

281
00:22:14,720 --> 00:22:18,080
Speaker 1: an Ethnic series for a while. His name was Tetos Demitrioti's.

282
00:22:18,560 --> 00:22:22,119
Speaker 1: He had a great ear new talent and stayed in

283
00:22:22,119 --> 00:22:25,840
Speaker 1: the record business for decades and decades and decades. Demitriots

284
00:22:26,280 --> 00:22:30,560
Speaker 1: was a young guy from Constantinople. He was Greek and

285
00:22:30,680 --> 00:22:34,280
Speaker 1: very cosmopolitan in his view of music, A real lover

286
00:22:34,359 --> 00:22:37,639
Speaker 1: of music. I think he was himself a singer, not

287
00:22:37,880 --> 00:22:42,240
Speaker 1: a great singer, but serviceable, perfectly fine. He was a

288
00:22:42,280 --> 00:22:45,520
Speaker 1: nice looking guy. But his big hit record, which he

289
00:22:45,560 --> 00:22:48,960
Speaker 1: re recorded several times and republished a sheet music and

290
00:22:49,160 --> 00:22:51,960
Speaker 1: you know, really milked as much as he could. It

291
00:22:52,000 --> 00:22:54,920
Speaker 1: was a song that really took the public imagination for decades,

292
00:22:55,440 --> 00:23:07,760
Speaker 1: called miser Loop, which means little Egyptian Girl. All that

293
00:23:08,000 --> 00:23:19,160
Speaker 1: name he recorded at first, Well, it becomes a song

294
00:23:19,240 --> 00:23:22,600
Speaker 1: that's played by klezmer bands in the forties and fifties,

295
00:23:22,600 --> 00:23:25,439
Speaker 1: and it winds up being performed by singers of the

296
00:23:25,520 --> 00:23:30,320
Speaker 1: classic American songbook with new lyrics in English Desert Chattels,

297
00:23:30,680 --> 00:23:35,240
Speaker 1: Three Books, Purple sid and then you know, it winds

298
00:23:35,280 --> 00:23:37,720
Speaker 1: up being covered by Dick Dale and the Dell Tones

299
00:23:38,240 --> 00:23:41,240
Speaker 1: for one, and eventually used the theme song for the

300
00:23:41,280 --> 00:23:49,119
Speaker 1: movie Pulp Fiction. So Demitrioti's interest in americanizing Greek music

301
00:23:49,560 --> 00:23:52,080
Speaker 1: winds up happening in this way that he never could

302
00:23:52,080 --> 00:23:57,480
Speaker 1: have predicted. Now it's been pointed out that Dick Dale's

303
00:23:57,600 --> 00:24:02,439
Speaker 1: uncle was an OWD player, and that his surf guitar

304
00:24:02,680 --> 00:24:05,880
Speaker 1: style of this you know, fluttering kind of right hand

305
00:24:05,920 --> 00:24:09,840
Speaker 1: picking technique, it was most likely derived in some way

306
00:24:09,880 --> 00:24:13,520
Speaker 1: from his uncle's food playing and that surf guitar, the

307
00:24:13,640 --> 00:24:17,400
Speaker 1: ventures and all that kind of stuff comes partially from

308
00:24:17,640 --> 00:24:22,280
Speaker 1: exposure to immigrants from the Near East, Lebanese and Armenian players,

309
00:24:22,280 --> 00:24:25,440
Speaker 1: in particular, lots and lots of them in California. Fresno

310
00:24:25,720 --> 00:24:33,439
Speaker 1: was largely built by Armenians. So why can these records

311
00:24:33,480 --> 00:24:36,800
Speaker 1: be so hard to find now? Well, in the first place,

312
00:24:37,040 --> 00:24:43,280
Speaker 1: they weren't necessarily minted in vast quantities. A good selling

313
00:24:43,760 --> 00:24:47,280
Speaker 1: ethnic or foreign record in the nineteen teams or twenties

314
00:24:47,560 --> 00:24:50,919
Speaker 1: is selling three hundred to three thousand copies roughly. You know,

315
00:24:51,080 --> 00:24:54,359
Speaker 1: three thousand is quite good. Three d is a bit disappointing.

316
00:24:54,560 --> 00:24:56,679
Speaker 1: There are certainly examples on the books of records that

317
00:24:56,760 --> 00:25:02,040
Speaker 1: only sold twelve copies or thirty copies or something. But

318
00:25:02,320 --> 00:25:05,119
Speaker 1: the records that were produced have a long shelf life

319
00:25:05,280 --> 00:25:08,280
Speaker 1: due to their composition, of which shellac is not the

320
00:25:08,320 --> 00:25:12,880
Speaker 1: main ingredient. They're made of about ten to fifteen percent shelack.

321
00:25:13,600 --> 00:25:17,960
Speaker 1: What they're mostly made of, the records is about ground stone.

322
00:25:18,720 --> 00:25:20,720
Speaker 1: Then there's added to that, you know, some carbon blacks,

323
00:25:20,760 --> 00:25:24,040
Speaker 1: so they're uniformly black, so you've got a consistent looking product.

324
00:25:24,560 --> 00:25:29,560
Speaker 1: Some cotton fiber is binder, but they're basically stones. They

325
00:25:29,560 --> 00:25:33,399
Speaker 1: will blast for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

326
00:25:34,240 --> 00:25:38,760
Speaker 1: If they're not worn out by being played, or if

327
00:25:38,800 --> 00:25:43,320
Speaker 1: they're not abused, are neglected, they'll last a very very

328
00:25:43,359 --> 00:25:46,880
Speaker 1: long time, much much longer than you or me or

329
00:25:46,920 --> 00:25:56,160
Speaker 1: anybody who will ever remember us. The conditions that made

330
00:25:56,200 --> 00:26:01,280
Speaker 1: these recordings so rare. That confluence of factors again gets

331
00:26:01,320 --> 00:26:08,240
Speaker 1: tangled in questions of American identity. Okay, Grandma and Grandpa

332
00:26:08,680 --> 00:26:11,840
Speaker 1: came from the old Country, and they accumulated a little

333
00:26:11,840 --> 00:26:14,560
Speaker 1: stack of this old country music that they would listen

334
00:26:14,600 --> 00:26:18,119
Speaker 1: to sometimes when they're feeling nostalgic or parties or something.

335
00:26:18,800 --> 00:26:20,400
Speaker 1: Mom and Dad grew up in this house and they

336
00:26:20,440 --> 00:26:24,160
Speaker 1: heard those records sometimes, but it's not their music. They

337
00:26:24,160 --> 00:26:26,520
Speaker 1: were Americans. They grew up with American music and tried

338
00:26:26,560 --> 00:26:28,840
Speaker 1: to be more American, and they didn't really connect with

339
00:26:28,880 --> 00:26:32,399
Speaker 1: the music. Now, Grandma and Grandpa died and lady left

340
00:26:32,440 --> 00:26:34,280
Speaker 1: behind these records, and the record stuck around in the

341
00:26:34,280 --> 00:26:37,239
Speaker 1: attic or the basement, and then Mom and Dad are

342
00:26:37,240 --> 00:26:38,720
Speaker 1: getting up there, and now we've got to find a

343
00:26:38,800 --> 00:26:42,960
Speaker 1: thing to do with these records. So what do you do.

344
00:26:43,920 --> 00:26:46,720
Speaker 1: You've seen antique road show. You know, there's such a

345
00:26:46,760 --> 00:26:49,520
Speaker 1: thing as people who like this old stuff. They're antiques.

346
00:26:50,040 --> 00:26:54,520
Speaker 1: They're antiques, right, Somebody wants these, So you go you

347
00:26:54,600 --> 00:26:59,360
Speaker 1: find yourself a nerd. You go find yourself a record collector.

348
00:26:59,720 --> 00:27:01,960
Speaker 1: Not easy to do, but there he is. He shows up,

349
00:27:02,240 --> 00:27:05,400
Speaker 1: He looks through your records and he goes, yeah, it's

350
00:27:05,400 --> 00:27:08,760
Speaker 1: not really what I'm looking for. I don't collect foreign.

351
00:27:09,800 --> 00:27:12,359
Speaker 1: It's an actual line from the movie Ghost World. I

352
00:27:12,600 --> 00:27:17,880
Speaker 1: don't really collect That's what they all said for years.

353
00:27:18,240 --> 00:27:22,760
Speaker 1: I don't collect foreign. Nobody did. What record collectors collected

354
00:27:23,320 --> 00:27:29,000
Speaker 1: was stuff that had to do with the story of America, country, blues, jazz, gospel,

355
00:27:30,080 --> 00:27:32,200
Speaker 1: and so that's what the seventy collectors were looking for.

356
00:27:33,200 --> 00:27:37,040
Speaker 1: But the immigrants stuff, the ethnic stuff. The record collector

357
00:27:37,080 --> 00:27:39,160
Speaker 1: is standing there in your living room with your grandparents

358
00:27:39,200 --> 00:27:40,720
Speaker 1: records in his hand, and he hands them back to

359
00:27:40,720 --> 00:27:42,719
Speaker 1: you and he goes, sorry, it's nothing here. I can

360
00:27:42,840 --> 00:27:49,560
Speaker 1: use really dollar apiece now, sorry, it's just I don't

361
00:27:49,680 --> 00:27:53,439
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody wants these. So then what happens

362
00:27:53,440 --> 00:27:58,400
Speaker 1: to them? Will you throw them away? They're junk? If

363
00:27:58,440 --> 00:28:01,600
Speaker 1: that guy doesn't want them, nobody he wants them, right,

364
00:28:02,800 --> 00:28:06,040
Speaker 1: maybe you try them on eBay. Not many people buying

365
00:28:06,080 --> 00:28:09,560
Speaker 1: them on eBay. You know, it's the hardly worth boxing

366
00:28:09,560 --> 00:28:11,960
Speaker 1: and up for you know, a dollar or two a piece.

367
00:28:24,760 --> 00:28:30,440
Speaker 1: It's this broader cultural sense of America, as American culture

368
00:28:30,480 --> 00:28:34,680
Speaker 1: doesn't include all this stuff that happened in foreign languages

369
00:28:34,760 --> 00:28:39,040
Speaker 1: or vernacular, foreign ideas. That has led to the scarcity

370
00:28:39,040 --> 00:28:42,840
Speaker 1: of their records because there just hasn't been a broader

371
00:28:42,880 --> 00:28:45,840
Speaker 1: conversation about the value of them. There hasn't been a

372
00:28:46,520 --> 00:28:51,240
Speaker 1: a guess culturally that that they matter, so they get

373
00:28:51,240 --> 00:29:04,840
Speaker 1: thrown in the garbage. Rescuing a work before he gets

374
00:29:04,840 --> 00:29:08,560
Speaker 1: thrown in the garbage is, of course, only the first step.

375
00:29:09,480 --> 00:29:12,480
Speaker 1: These records come laden with questions, and even the most

376
00:29:12,520 --> 00:29:17,680
Speaker 1: dogged diligent research sometimes leads to a dead end. Some

377
00:29:17,760 --> 00:29:20,920
Speaker 1: of these people, I've been able to dig up biographical information.

378
00:29:20,960 --> 00:29:22,719
Speaker 1: I've been able to get a sense of who they

379
00:29:22,760 --> 00:29:24,920
Speaker 1: were and what they accomplished, and what their lives were like,

380
00:29:25,200 --> 00:29:27,560
Speaker 1: where they were from, at least when they were born,

381
00:29:27,680 --> 00:29:31,200
Speaker 1: when they died or something. This is a guy, for instance,

382
00:29:31,200 --> 00:29:34,200
Speaker 1: that I don't think we'll ever really know anything that

383
00:29:34,360 --> 00:29:38,920
Speaker 1: much about he made a few dozen records for both

384
00:29:39,040 --> 00:29:42,200
Speaker 1: Colombia and Victor in the nineteen teens, and then he

385
00:29:42,280 --> 00:29:45,600
Speaker 1: just vanishes. No idea where he went. We don't know

386
00:29:45,640 --> 00:29:50,000
Speaker 1: where he came from, and we probably never will. The

387
00:29:50,120 --> 00:29:52,520
Speaker 1: name that he uses on the labels of the records

388
00:29:53,400 --> 00:29:57,840
Speaker 1: is the reason we won't know. The name is Kim Animanas.

389
00:29:59,280 --> 00:30:02,440
Speaker 1: Menas is just real common last name, and Kemeny is

390
00:30:02,480 --> 00:30:06,320
Speaker 1: just an honorific It just means very good violinist. So

391
00:30:06,520 --> 00:30:08,280
Speaker 1: there's really kind of no way to look up a

392
00:30:08,280 --> 00:30:21,720
Speaker 1: guy like that. This is his masterpiece. This is his

393
00:30:21,760 --> 00:30:24,800
Speaker 1: best performance. They're all good. He never made a bad record,

394
00:30:25,000 --> 00:30:37,440
Speaker 1: but this is the great one. Y nagging be yea

395
00:30:43,520 --> 00:31:00,760
Speaker 1: yeah day yah yeah. This is a record from v

396
00:31:01,400 --> 00:31:05,600
Speaker 1: that's a description of the destruction of the village of

397
00:31:05,640 --> 00:31:33,000
Speaker 1: Aigan dam redidi j. Aigan was way out in eastern

398
00:31:33,080 --> 00:31:38,120
Speaker 1: Turkey near the Review Frates, and Aigan was systemically destroyed.

399
00:31:38,800 --> 00:31:41,400
Speaker 1: A third of the population was killed and half of

400
00:31:41,440 --> 00:31:43,959
Speaker 1: the homes were burned by the Ottoman government as part

401
00:31:44,000 --> 00:31:48,320
Speaker 1: of the Hammadian massacres in direct retaliation for the political

402
00:31:48,360 --> 00:31:53,560
Speaker 1: action of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. This song is a

403
00:31:53,720 --> 00:31:57,880
Speaker 1: direct account remembered by our Armenian immigrants to the United

404
00:31:57,960 --> 00:32:13,840
Speaker 1: States of that tragedy a day. Yeah, it's a super performance,

405
00:32:13,880 --> 00:32:16,480
Speaker 1: one of the most wonderful vocal performances I've ever heard

406
00:32:16,520 --> 00:32:20,360
Speaker 1: in my life. And the record sold like absolute hotcakes.

407
00:32:20,840 --> 00:32:28,239
Speaker 1: I mean, thousands and thousands of copies. Gid up. It's

408
00:32:28,240 --> 00:32:31,720
Speaker 1: an incredibly easy record to get, and it's worth almost nothing.

409
00:32:32,280 --> 00:32:34,480
Speaker 1: I think you probably get like a beautiful copy on

410
00:32:34,560 --> 00:32:37,480
Speaker 1: eBay right now for like ten bucks. But it's a jewel.

411
00:32:37,560 --> 00:32:48,520
Speaker 1: It's a real masterpiece and we'll never know who he was. Yet.

412
00:33:01,120 --> 00:33:04,000
Speaker 1: Not every track that Canary has reissued qualifies as rare.

413
00:33:04,880 --> 00:33:09,080
Speaker 1: For instance, one disc that's abundantly available paints a biting

414
00:33:09,160 --> 00:33:14,680
Speaker 1: portrayal of life in the US. One of the very

415
00:33:14,760 --> 00:33:17,960
Speaker 1: first records in Turkish that I ever bought was a

416
00:33:18,040 --> 00:33:21,960
Speaker 1: record called nt Him Get Him amry Kaya. I'm pronouncing

417
00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:24,480
Speaker 1: that wrong. I pronounced everything wrong because I only speak English.

418
00:33:25,000 --> 00:33:28,680
Speaker 1: I've owned maybe seven eight copies of this record over

419
00:33:28,720 --> 00:33:31,160
Speaker 1: the years, like you find it all over the place.

420
00:33:31,200 --> 00:33:33,280
Speaker 1: The first one I bought was fifty cents, and I

421
00:33:33,360 --> 00:33:35,360
Speaker 1: don't think I've paid much more for one since then.

422
00:33:36,120 --> 00:33:38,680
Speaker 1: It turns up all over the place it was made

423
00:33:38,800 --> 00:33:42,600
Speaker 1: in for Columbia. It's a twelve inch disc, meaning it

424
00:33:42,680 --> 00:33:45,920
Speaker 1: was a dollar twenty five at the time, a much

425
00:33:46,000 --> 00:33:50,200
Speaker 1: more expensive record, and must have sold tens of thousands,

426
00:33:50,240 --> 00:33:55,560
Speaker 1: potentially a hundred thousand copies, probably to every Turkish speaking

427
00:33:55,600 --> 00:33:58,280
Speaker 1: household in the United States at the end of the

428
00:33:58,320 --> 00:34:02,400
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties. The guy who made it was a Greek

429
00:34:02,400 --> 00:34:08,440
Speaker 1: guy from northwest present day Turkey. His name is Achilles Pulos.

430
00:34:08,680 --> 00:34:10,960
Speaker 1: He was a good dude player. He was a party guy.

431
00:34:11,840 --> 00:34:15,920
Speaker 1: Every Polo story includes some amount of drinking and boozing.

432
00:34:16,920 --> 00:34:20,279
Speaker 1: Poulos and his wife owned a little nightclub around forty

433
00:34:20,360 --> 00:34:24,560
Speaker 1: one eighth Avenue, and during Prohibition they got shut down

434
00:34:24,600 --> 00:34:27,640
Speaker 1: by the cops for selling booze. The cops shut down

435
00:34:27,680 --> 00:34:30,120
Speaker 1: the place and throw Polos in the tombs for a

436
00:34:30,239 --> 00:34:34,279
Speaker 1: couple of nights. He gets out, opens up another place

437
00:34:34,400 --> 00:34:36,960
Speaker 1: exactly Cateacorner, and goes right back to doing what he

438
00:34:37,080 --> 00:34:39,239
Speaker 1: was doing. But it was a place where you could

439
00:34:39,239 --> 00:34:40,800
Speaker 1: go in, you could get a coffee cup full of

440
00:34:40,840 --> 00:34:42,759
Speaker 1: booze and listen to a guy play songs from home.

441
00:34:47,360 --> 00:34:50,440
Speaker 1: Achilles puloss biggest hit was this song, let Him Get

442
00:34:50,480 --> 00:34:54,719
Speaker 1: Him Americaya, which means why I came to America. It

443
00:34:54,800 --> 00:34:57,440
Speaker 1: seems to be his own lyrics to a an older

444
00:34:57,680 --> 00:35:01,080
Speaker 1: traditional song that he knew, and the song is about

445
00:35:01,719 --> 00:35:04,000
Speaker 1: regretting the choice to have come to the United States

446
00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:25,399
Speaker 1: so cruel? Why do you make us suffer? I wish

447
00:35:25,440 --> 00:35:29,160
Speaker 1: I never came, never saw? This is part of what

448
00:35:29,239 --> 00:35:38,719
Speaker 1: he sings in it all. John bitch All, John oh

449
00:35:51,600 --> 00:36:09,480
Speaker 1: Sy Achilles Pullos records prolifically songs in about five years,

450
00:36:10,040 --> 00:36:13,560
Speaker 1: and then the depression hits nine and he just disappears,

451
00:36:14,160 --> 00:36:17,360
Speaker 1: just gone. There's just no more Achilles Polos records. Just

452
00:36:17,440 --> 00:36:20,280
Speaker 1: strange for somebody who sold so many records and seemed

453
00:36:20,280 --> 00:36:22,959
Speaker 1: to be had been so popular. And so the story

454
00:36:23,040 --> 00:36:27,000
Speaker 1: circulated that he had been ratted out to immigration services

455
00:36:27,320 --> 00:36:30,200
Speaker 1: for having made this record, for having made something so

456
00:36:30,440 --> 00:36:35,040
Speaker 1: disrespectful to America. America was deporting a lot of people

457
00:36:35,520 --> 00:36:39,000
Speaker 1: in the twenties for almost any reason. It wasn't hard

458
00:36:39,040 --> 00:36:41,920
Speaker 1: to trump up something to make you look like a

459
00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:45,759
Speaker 1: criminal and send you back on your way. The story

460
00:36:45,800 --> 00:36:49,799
Speaker 1: is circulated for decades that that's what happened to Pulos. Well,

461
00:36:50,719 --> 00:36:53,080
Speaker 1: as I began looking into Pulos a little bit more.

462
00:36:53,600 --> 00:36:57,000
Speaker 1: It turns out, no, he didn't go back to Turkey.

463
00:36:57,440 --> 00:37:00,800
Speaker 1: He went somewhere else. He went to Connecticut, h I

464
00:37:00,840 --> 00:37:04,279
Speaker 1: went to work for a coffee roaster, and he's buried there.

465
00:37:04,400 --> 00:37:10,000
Speaker 1: He died there in the nineteen seventies. Apparently he had

466
00:37:10,080 --> 00:37:14,799
Speaker 1: arthritis and it got hard to play, and I think

467
00:37:14,880 --> 00:37:20,160
Speaker 1: the drinking thing didn't help. So we only get about

468
00:37:20,239 --> 00:37:24,520
Speaker 1: five years of Achille Polos's life on record, unfortunately, including

469
00:37:24,600 --> 00:37:37,719
Speaker 1: this like Monster, Monster Hit Here Get that's one of

470
00:37:37,760 --> 00:37:41,960
Speaker 1: the most important commentaries on the immigrant life in America

471
00:37:42,000 --> 00:37:55,879
Speaker 1: at the time. I think in many of these performances,

472
00:37:56,200 --> 00:38:00,520
Speaker 1: the lyrics course with anxiety and fear. In the nine twenties,

473
00:38:00,640 --> 00:38:04,680
Speaker 1: that was in some part reflective of mounting changes in

474
00:38:04,840 --> 00:38:09,080
Speaker 1: US immigration policy. For a very long time in the

475
00:38:09,200 --> 00:38:14,839
Speaker 1: United States, there's simply were no laws restricting immigration. If

476
00:38:14,920 --> 00:38:17,880
Speaker 1: you can make it, you're in. End of the nineteenth

477
00:38:17,880 --> 00:38:22,239
Speaker 1: century is the Chinese Exclusion Act. United States specifically decides

478
00:38:22,800 --> 00:38:25,080
Speaker 1: there's a group of people we don't like and we

479
00:38:25,239 --> 00:38:27,400
Speaker 1: don't trust, and we don't think are part of us,

480
00:38:27,880 --> 00:38:31,359
Speaker 1: and we're not letting any more of them. In most

481
00:38:31,400 --> 00:38:34,839
Speaker 1: of America was behind that idea opened a huge can

482
00:38:34,920 --> 00:38:40,400
Speaker 1: of worms. In the U S government passed the Johnson

483
00:38:40,520 --> 00:38:46,160
Speaker 1: Read Act, which established quotas based on nation of origin

484
00:38:46,320 --> 00:38:49,680
Speaker 1: in immigration. The quotas were basically set up so that

485
00:38:50,080 --> 00:38:54,440
Speaker 1: America would stay percentage wise exactly the color of white

486
00:38:55,320 --> 00:38:59,520
Speaker 1: that the nation had been fifty years earlier, the same

487
00:38:59,600 --> 00:39:02,279
Speaker 1: percent tage of Germans, the same percentage of English, the

488
00:39:02,320 --> 00:39:07,239
Speaker 1: same percentage of Irish, to maintain a particular racial profile

489
00:39:07,800 --> 00:39:12,960
Speaker 1: for the country. From onward, lots of Scandinavians were allowed,

490
00:39:13,040 --> 00:39:18,239
Speaker 1: lots of Germans, lots of English, lots of French, fewer Italians,

491
00:39:19,200 --> 00:39:27,560
Speaker 1: fewer Polls, very few Syrians, Greeks, Turks, no one from Africa,

492
00:39:28,640 --> 00:39:34,239
Speaker 1: and no one from Asian period for four decades, that

493
00:39:34,520 --> 00:39:39,719
Speaker 1: remained the situation for immigrants in the United States. It's

494
00:39:39,760 --> 00:39:42,239
Speaker 1: not that they couldn't have come, it's that we said,

495
00:39:42,960 --> 00:39:45,920
Speaker 1: we don't want our country to look like that, and

496
00:39:46,000 --> 00:39:48,120
Speaker 1: the result for people who had come from the Ottoman

497
00:39:48,200 --> 00:39:52,960
Speaker 1: Empire was that their families couldn't come anymore, and it

498
00:39:53,040 --> 00:40:12,839
Speaker 1: broke families up. Godsia I have bid us I bed us.

499
00:40:16,239 --> 00:40:20,800
Speaker 1: This is a record made about twenty seven thereabouts called gukas,

500
00:40:20,960 --> 00:40:41,600
Speaker 1: which means where do you come from a shot shot

501
00:40:42,920 --> 00:40:47,280
Speaker 1: why not. It was recorded for the Pharaohs Record Company

502
00:40:47,440 --> 00:40:50,279
Speaker 1: by a guy named Nishan kill Jackian who was a

503
00:40:50,640 --> 00:40:54,000
Speaker 1: land surveyor for the city of Medford. He didn't record

504
00:40:54,200 --> 00:40:56,879
Speaker 1: very much, but he did make this one I think

505
00:40:57,200 --> 00:41:00,320
Speaker 1: very important record because it is, as far as I know,

506
00:41:00,920 --> 00:41:06,239
Speaker 1: the only Armenian record that directly protests something. And what

507
00:41:06,360 --> 00:41:10,360
Speaker 1: it's directly protesting is the Johnson Read Act the problem

508
00:41:10,440 --> 00:41:17,200
Speaker 1: of Armanian families being separated by immigration cours. I got,

509
00:41:17,480 --> 00:41:38,680
Speaker 1: I got a prisoner, but there is no singular experience

510
00:41:39,320 --> 00:41:43,680
Speaker 1: verified by just how eclectic emigrat catalogs could be. There

511
00:41:43,719 --> 00:41:48,960
Speaker 1: were songs of hardship, songs of protest, and nihilistic party songs.

512
00:41:50,880 --> 00:41:53,840
Speaker 1: Another performer that I've been looking into specifically as a

513
00:41:54,040 --> 00:41:59,880
Speaker 1: personality and as a biography is Edward Begoesian. Yet Vartoi

514
00:42:00,640 --> 00:42:03,520
Speaker 1: Bogosian was like a good time guy, a fun guy,

515
00:42:03,600 --> 00:42:06,319
Speaker 1: party guy, kind of a drunk uncle type. I guess

516
00:42:06,360 --> 00:42:10,360
Speaker 1: you could say. He was born nine hundred in Constantinople,

517
00:42:11,120 --> 00:42:14,320
Speaker 1: arrives in the us UH and tours around as a comedian.

518
00:42:14,480 --> 00:42:18,760
Speaker 1: He's a clown the stage show where he sings funny,

519
00:42:18,920 --> 00:42:22,200
Speaker 1: almost dirty songs. Some of his songs are things about

520
00:42:22,280 --> 00:42:25,719
Speaker 1: like gambling and like don't trust your husbands, and you know,

521
00:42:26,480 --> 00:42:30,520
Speaker 1: stuff about people manipulating each other for immigration status, you know,

522
00:42:30,719 --> 00:42:33,920
Speaker 1: all kinds of you know, fun cynical kind of stuff.

523
00:42:34,800 --> 00:42:39,120
Speaker 1: Starts recording for Pharaos Records in the twenties, go silent

524
00:42:39,200 --> 00:42:41,560
Speaker 1: through the depression, and starts recording again in the early

525
00:42:41,640 --> 00:42:44,920
Speaker 1: forties for a little independent company that was marketing records

526
00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:58,560
Speaker 1: to Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Albanian, Ladino speaking immigrants. Remember this

527
00:42:58,719 --> 00:43:01,319
Speaker 1: is almost twenty years to the Johnson read Act. These

528
00:43:01,320 --> 00:43:05,040
Speaker 1: are people who barely remember whom. These are people for

529
00:43:05,160 --> 00:43:08,480
Speaker 1: whom you know, the past is back. There are ways

530
00:43:09,560 --> 00:43:13,240
Speaker 1: And this song was his biggest hit, who was massively popular.

531
00:43:13,680 --> 00:43:46,800
Speaker 1: Song called man then said I and the lyrics basically go,

532
00:43:47,440 --> 00:43:49,960
Speaker 1: you know you can't trust anybody in this life. Don't

533
00:43:50,000 --> 00:43:53,239
Speaker 1: believe what people tell you me. I like to eat,

534
00:43:53,800 --> 00:43:56,040
Speaker 1: I like to drink booze, I like to have a

535
00:43:56,080 --> 00:43:59,880
Speaker 1: good time. Keith is the word means stoned in Turkish,

536
00:44:00,040 --> 00:44:02,399
Speaker 1: but in Armenian it basically just means like laid back,

537
00:44:02,520 --> 00:44:17,000
Speaker 1: relaxed times kes And then comes the big single long

538
00:44:17,080 --> 00:44:22,839
Speaker 1: chorus which means in English, it's fake. It's fake, it's fake,

539
00:44:22,880 --> 00:44:44,319
Speaker 1: it steake, everything is fake in Armenian. Buddy of mine,

540
00:44:44,480 --> 00:44:46,080
Speaker 1: when I first told him that I was interested in

541
00:44:46,160 --> 00:44:50,120
Speaker 1: this song, he goes like, you know, come on, He's like, look,

542
00:44:50,280 --> 00:44:51,640
Speaker 1: if you're like me and you go to a lot

543
00:44:51,680 --> 00:44:54,440
Speaker 1: of Armenian events, it's like having a gel. You know,

544
00:44:54,520 --> 00:44:57,800
Speaker 1: it's a cliche, like I'm so used to hearing drunk

545
00:44:57,880 --> 00:45:02,959
Speaker 1: uncle's playing the song. But for such a cliche, there

546
00:45:03,160 --> 00:45:06,640
Speaker 1: are no copies of this record online. You can't go

547
00:45:06,880 --> 00:45:09,719
Speaker 1: hear this record unless you have a seventy eight of it.

548
00:45:10,320 --> 00:45:16,080
Speaker 1: That's it. It hasn't circulated in seventy years almost, and

549
00:45:16,160 --> 00:45:33,800
Speaker 1: it's a massive, great hit song of its time. Do

550
00:45:33,920 --> 00:45:37,600
Speaker 1: you feel kind of like a yeah, a gate keeper

551
00:45:37,960 --> 00:45:43,479
Speaker 1: holding these personal stories. I'm not keeping them. I'm trying

552
00:45:43,520 --> 00:45:45,239
Speaker 1: to get rid of them as fast as I can.

553
00:45:46,280 --> 00:45:49,160
Speaker 1: I have taken them on and have tried to learn

554
00:45:49,239 --> 00:45:51,560
Speaker 1: them in as much detail and to be able to

555
00:45:51,640 --> 00:45:55,520
Speaker 1: tell them as best I can. But I don't want

556
00:45:55,560 --> 00:45:58,080
Speaker 1: to have to keep them. They belong to other people

557
00:45:58,160 --> 00:46:01,280
Speaker 1: more than they do to me. Please ease do something

558
00:46:01,320 --> 00:46:04,000
Speaker 1: with him, because I won't be here all that long.

559
00:46:04,840 --> 00:46:07,279
Speaker 1: And the stories and the ideas and the performers and

560
00:46:07,360 --> 00:46:10,320
Speaker 1: the performances, those have got to stay for a while

561
00:46:11,440 --> 00:46:17,920
Speaker 1: longer than me. Hopefully the last artist will play here

562
00:46:18,200 --> 00:46:21,400
Speaker 1: is the first I heard from the Canary collection, and

563
00:46:21,520 --> 00:46:25,239
Speaker 1: indeed my introduction to this sliver of history, this moment

564
00:46:25,320 --> 00:46:30,000
Speaker 1: that time forgot. The voice of Zabel Pennosian haunts me.

565
00:46:31,080 --> 00:46:36,400
Speaker 1: It haunts Ian as it has haunted countless more. Isabel

566
00:46:36,440 --> 00:46:41,319
Speaker 1: Pennosian recorded only about a dozen performances over the course

567
00:46:41,320 --> 00:46:47,600
Speaker 1: of about a year in Zabel Pennosian was born in

568
00:46:48,080 --> 00:46:53,200
Speaker 1: northeastern Anatolia immigrants, comes through France and then comes to

569
00:46:53,280 --> 00:46:57,840
Speaker 1: the US, where she settles in Boston. She's classically trained,

570
00:46:58,239 --> 00:47:01,960
Speaker 1: performs with the short lived Boston an Opera Company. Winds

571
00:47:02,040 --> 00:47:06,200
Speaker 1: up making this series of records for Colombia in New

572
00:47:06,280 --> 00:47:10,239
Speaker 1: York in the teens, and then she tours around for

573
00:47:10,719 --> 00:47:12,960
Speaker 1: some years in the United States raising money for the

574
00:47:13,080 --> 00:47:17,560
Speaker 1: Near East Relief Campaign, the first massive philanthropic project in

575
00:47:17,640 --> 00:47:20,640
Speaker 1: the United States, raised millions and millions and millions of

576
00:47:20,719 --> 00:47:25,120
Speaker 1: dollars for people who were suffering in Turkey and Syria.

577
00:47:26,880 --> 00:47:29,600
Speaker 1: Then she winds up touring all over Europe for a

578
00:47:29,680 --> 00:47:32,279
Speaker 1: couple of the decades really and is a huge star

579
00:47:32,760 --> 00:47:37,080
Speaker 1: playing all these fancy opera houses. She comes back to

580
00:47:37,080 --> 00:47:42,719
Speaker 1: the US basically becomes a quiet, private citizen. None of

581
00:47:42,800 --> 00:47:45,880
Speaker 1: her kids have kids, so she has no direct descendants.

582
00:47:46,600 --> 00:47:50,200
Speaker 1: There are still living nieces and nephews who never knew

583
00:47:51,040 --> 00:47:56,239
Speaker 1: that their aunt was a musician at all. But she

584
00:47:56,360 --> 00:48:00,799
Speaker 1: recorded one of the definitive Armenian songs of the first

585
00:48:00,800 --> 00:48:03,640
Speaker 1: part of the twentieth century, a record that tour people's

586
00:48:03,680 --> 00:48:17,600
Speaker 1: hearts out and sold like crazy for decades. The song

587
00:48:17,719 --> 00:49:07,040
Speaker 1: is called Grunk Means Cream. It's a melody that she

588
00:49:07,120 --> 00:49:10,080
Speaker 1: actually remembers from childhood, and she seems to have basically

589
00:49:10,160 --> 00:49:15,080
Speaker 1: composed and arranged this song herself. The reason it was

590
00:49:15,160 --> 00:49:18,360
Speaker 1: such a huge hit in the US was that the

591
00:49:18,480 --> 00:49:23,120
Speaker 1: lyrics are basically crane. Do you have any news from home?

592
00:49:25,360 --> 00:49:30,520
Speaker 1: Please don't run back, There'll be enough time. I want

593
00:49:30,600 --> 00:49:35,680
Speaker 1: to know what's happening back home with my people. That's

594
00:49:36,080 --> 00:49:41,400
Speaker 1: the basic gist of the lyrics. The conflicts between Armenians

595
00:49:41,719 --> 00:49:46,280
Speaker 1: and the Turkish Ottoman government had escalated to a point

596
00:49:46,600 --> 00:49:50,880
Speaker 1: where the Turkish government had decided to simply solve the problem,

597
00:49:51,360 --> 00:49:55,680
Speaker 1: and they did so in this systemic way. The Ottoman

598
00:49:55,760 --> 00:50:00,239
Speaker 1: government had rounded up a million, million and a half

599
00:50:00,480 --> 00:50:05,680
Speaker 1: Armenians out of their villages and begun marching them southward

600
00:50:05,719 --> 00:50:12,360
Speaker 1: into the Syrian desert, where they died of famine first exposure.

601
00:50:13,200 --> 00:50:18,080
Speaker 1: It was the first genocide of the twentieth century. It

602
00:50:18,200 --> 00:50:20,760
Speaker 1: was the event for which the term genocide was invented.

603
00:50:23,000 --> 00:50:26,759
Speaker 1: Armenians who were in the United States, therefore, we're in

604
00:50:26,840 --> 00:50:31,080
Speaker 1: a situation where they were desperate for news about home.

605
00:50:33,120 --> 00:50:36,359
Speaker 1: Not only had the government confiscated their homes, their land,

606
00:50:36,480 --> 00:50:41,800
Speaker 1: their rugs, their money, whatever they left behind. Also, to

607
00:50:41,960 --> 00:50:47,960
Speaker 1: their great horror, reports began coming in that everyone they

608
00:50:48,080 --> 00:50:54,960
Speaker 1: ever knew was dead, and there was no home to

609
00:50:55,040 --> 00:50:59,680
Speaker 1: go back to anymore. There simply was nowhere left, that

610
00:51:00,080 --> 00:51:06,680
Speaker 1: is whom, Nothing that they remembered could ever be repeated,

611
00:51:08,400 --> 00:51:15,880
Speaker 1: and almost everybody you knew was gone. So drunk was

612
00:51:16,840 --> 00:51:22,960
Speaker 1: the perfect distillation of that horror and sorrow and desperation

613
00:51:23,719 --> 00:51:26,800
Speaker 1: of being stranded as an Armenian in the United States.

614
00:51:27,760 --> 00:52:55,200
Speaker 1: Immediately after the genocide, Genocide is record comes out. Now

615
00:52:55,280 --> 00:52:58,440
Speaker 1: This record was again a huge hit, sold thousands of copies.

616
00:52:59,160 --> 00:53:04,080
Speaker 1: When I first in countered it about I'd never heard

617
00:53:04,120 --> 00:53:06,920
Speaker 1: of it or her, and there was nothing to find out.

618
00:53:07,680 --> 00:53:11,480
Speaker 1: There was nobody to ask. The record had never been

619
00:53:11,520 --> 00:53:17,120
Speaker 1: written about once by anybody in any book. There wasn't

620
00:53:17,239 --> 00:53:22,719
Speaker 1: such a thing as Abell Pennosian in cultural memory. So

621
00:53:22,840 --> 00:53:24,759
Speaker 1: I began looking and looking looking, and then a couple

622
00:53:24,800 --> 00:53:27,239
Speaker 1: of buddies of mine got interested and joined in, and

623
00:53:27,400 --> 00:53:31,000
Speaker 1: they wound up turning up a bunch of Armenian language

624
00:53:31,040 --> 00:53:34,440
Speaker 1: newspapers and magazines and stuff from the old days that

625
00:53:34,560 --> 00:53:37,920
Speaker 1: did include some details. And so gradually we've gotten a

626
00:53:38,360 --> 00:53:41,040
Speaker 1: full picture of Zabelle's life, and we're going to be

627
00:53:41,080 --> 00:53:44,600
Speaker 1: able to tell her whole story of who she was

628
00:53:45,040 --> 00:53:49,120
Speaker 1: and what she accomplished. It's really just because these records

629
00:53:49,200 --> 00:53:52,920
Speaker 1: stick around and because they're made a stone. And it

630
00:53:53,480 --> 00:53:57,800
Speaker 1: mattered immensely that this song continued to live. I couldn't

631
00:53:57,880 --> 00:54:03,280
Speaker 1: understand how it could have been forgotten for so long. Somehow,

632
00:54:04,200 --> 00:54:08,320
Speaker 1: having this woman's voice as an American immigrant, as a refugee,

633
00:54:09,680 --> 00:54:12,279
Speaker 1: I think it matters to America that she gets to

634
00:54:12,320 --> 00:54:15,080
Speaker 1: be heard. I think it matters to music students that

635
00:54:15,200 --> 00:54:19,600
Speaker 1: they should know that this song exists, might change how

636
00:54:19,680 --> 00:54:23,839
Speaker 1: they think about themselves. Remembers the Bell's records were made

637
00:54:25,120 --> 00:54:28,680
Speaker 1: and marketed as ethnic records. These were not marketed as

638
00:54:29,000 --> 00:54:33,680
Speaker 1: read label classical records for fancy people, but they are.

639
00:54:35,200 --> 00:54:38,440
Speaker 1: She may have been, I think, seriously discouraged by the

640
00:54:38,480 --> 00:54:41,960
Speaker 1: fact that she was ghetto wized as a as an immigrant,

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Speaker 1: as an ethnic performer. Maybe that's one of the reasons

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00:54:46,719 --> 00:54:49,880
Speaker 1: she didn't record anymore in the US. We don't know

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00:54:50,840 --> 00:55:35,120
Speaker 1: working it out. The stories of these performers lives. The

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Speaker 1: brief glimpses we've been afforded, like the songs themselves, have

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Speaker 1: a timeless quality, but the lessons are perhaps more relevant

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00:55:44,800 --> 00:55:49,120
Speaker 1: than ever. There are certainly forces in America right now

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00:55:49,680 --> 00:55:54,200
Speaker 1: that are attempting to limit the definition of American nous

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00:55:55,320 --> 00:56:00,919
Speaker 1: that includes American creativity, and they're using a skewed version

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00:56:01,000 --> 00:56:04,160
Speaker 1: of history and a skewed sense of American identity to

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Speaker 1: do it. If all you know about America and the

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00:56:08,600 --> 00:56:11,160
Speaker 1: history of immigration to this country over the past hundred

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00:56:11,239 --> 00:56:15,000
Speaker 1: years is this tiny little bit of images and ideas

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00:56:15,080 --> 00:56:18,520
Speaker 1: that you get in a kind of public education, you'll

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00:56:18,520 --> 00:56:22,680
Speaker 1: be easily swayed. So I think it's extremely important, just

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Speaker 1: generally for Americans to look honestly and clearly at who

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Speaker 1: we are and what we've done. The fact of the

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00:56:31,000 --> 00:56:34,239
Speaker 1: matter is it's it's kind of great. It's a lot

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00:56:34,280 --> 00:56:37,400
Speaker 1: of fun. And I don't know that much about history.

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00:56:37,880 --> 00:56:41,880
Speaker 1: I'm not the best read person in the world. What

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00:56:42,040 --> 00:56:44,800
Speaker 1: I do know is that music is great. Music is

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00:56:44,840 --> 00:56:48,799
Speaker 1: always really, really, really good. And whenever anybody's playing music,

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00:56:49,040 --> 00:56:52,160
Speaker 1: they're not doing anything wrong, They're only doing something right.

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Speaker 1: To look at American music and what American musicians have

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00:56:56,600 --> 00:57:02,759
Speaker 1: accomplished is also always good and always a pleasure. It's

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00:57:02,800 --> 00:57:07,759
Speaker 1: the reverse of the kind of oppression and the kind

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00:57:07,840 --> 00:57:12,640
Speaker 1: of fear and anger that we see bubbling around in

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00:57:12,719 --> 00:57:18,400
Speaker 1: the in the culture. Records are great. I really like

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Speaker 1: old records along, Yeah me too. Ephemeral is written and

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Speaker 1: assembled by me and produced by any Reese, Matt Frederick,

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00:58:01,680 --> 00:58:05,800
Speaker 1: and Tristan McNeil, with technical assistance from Sherry Larson. Our

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00:58:05,880 --> 00:58:09,880
Speaker 1: hats off to Ian Nagaski for doing extraordinary work and

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00:58:09,960 --> 00:58:13,120
Speaker 1: for being so generous with his time. This conversation was

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00:58:13,200 --> 00:58:16,600
Speaker 1: inspired by the compilation to What Strange Place the Music

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00:58:16,680 --> 00:58:20,800
Speaker 1: of the Ottoman American Diaspora. You can find it all

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00:58:20,840 --> 00:58:24,560
Speaker 1: these songs and more at Canary Dash Records, Dot band

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00:58:24,640 --> 00:58:28,200
Speaker 1: camp dot com and a little something about us at

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00:58:28,200 --> 00:58:50,920
Speaker 1: ephemeral dot Shows in the world, Lad and Medium podcast

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00:58:51,120 --> 00:59:00,920
Speaker 1: and I I Media our podcast. Are you using your

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Speaker 1: favorite chist