Speaker 1: A federal as a protection of my heart radio. The
Speaker 1: history of American music in twelve seconds, things that related
Speaker 1: directly to what we created as Americans, that led up
Speaker 1: to our greatest musical contributions to the world. Old jazz,
Speaker 1: old blues, old gospel, old country, that's kind of America.
Speaker 1: That's one narrative, but the full story, like America itself,
Speaker 1: it's much more complicated. And Ian Nagaski has something he'd
Speaker 1: like to add. My name is Ian Nagaski. I'm a
Speaker 1: music researcher and record producer near Baltimore, Maryland. A little
Speaker 1: bit more than a decade now, I've been doing reissue
Speaker 1: records of old stuff and languages that I don't speak.
Speaker 1: Through his label, Canary Records, Ian has reissued all kinds
Speaker 1: of forgotten treasures, early American gospel, untraceable East Asian pop songs,
Speaker 1: recordings of wild birds, works that were almost forgotten. Some
Speaker 1: stuff he's literally pulled out of garbage cans. But of
Speaker 1: all of his projects, one is the pre eminent focus
Speaker 1: songs of Near and Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States,
Speaker 1: what I've been calling Ottoman diaspora music Ottoman as in
Speaker 1: the Ottoman Empire, which, like the Soviet Union, is an
Speaker 1: entity that no longer exists, but exerted a powerful force
Speaker 1: on the tides of history. Disclaimer, Well, I have to
Speaker 1: say that I'm not a an Ottomanist historian and academic
Speaker 1: or anything like that. There's a lot that you could
Speaker 1: get wrong. It's like saying, so what was ancient Rome?
Speaker 1: But the Ottoman Empire roughly was a huge swath of
Speaker 1: territory that expanded and contracted over about five hundred years,
Speaker 1: following the Byzantine Empire, which had succeeded the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1: It was founded by Turks, Turkic people from Central Asia
Speaker 1: who had migrated into what is present day Turkey Anatolia.
Speaker 1: They wound up conquering all of Anatolia, then conquered upward
Speaker 1: through almost all the Balkans up to the Danube River.
Speaker 1: In Mozart's grandparents time, they were knocking on the doorstep
Speaker 1: of the Austro Hungarian Empire. The Ottoman Empire then extended
Speaker 1: eastward all the way to Persia, southward along the Red
Speaker 1: Sea on both sides Egypt, down to Yemen, and then
Speaker 1: across almost all of North Africa. So a huge swath
Speaker 1: of of the world around the Mediterranean and what's now
Speaker 1: the Middle East, and it continued for about five hundred years.
Speaker 1: Starting in the early mid nineteenth century, territory started falling
Speaker 1: away pretty fast. Greece want its independence, and then more
Speaker 1: and more territories begin to secede, and the ethnic minorities
Speaker 1: are rising up in various ways. They're become huge military
Speaker 1: problems for the Empire, with the Russian Empire bearing down
Speaker 1: from the north. The First World War happens, there are
Speaker 1: a series of coups, there are huge financial debts, and
Speaker 1: the Empire finally comes apart shortly after the First World
Speaker 1: War and becomes now what is just the present day
Speaker 1: Republic of Turkey and a number of other countries, Syria, Bulgaria,
Speaker 1: lots of places were Ottoman for a very long time.
Speaker 1: You might think you've never heard music from this distant land,
Speaker 1: or that if you had, you certainly couldn't hum a
Speaker 1: few bars of it, But you'd be wrong. The first
Speaker 1: commercial recordings in the Turkish language occur under the ages
Speaker 1: of mg Prozekian ve but first recordings in Turkish and
Speaker 1: Arabic in the US generally occur at the Chicago World's
Speaker 1: Face in at that World's Fair. There were a number
Speaker 1: of pavilions. There was a Turkish pavilion and a Egyptian pavilion,
Speaker 1: and a Moroccan pavilion, for instance, so that people in
Speaker 1: Chicago could experience these cultures, and there were continuous performances
Speaker 1: of musicians and dancers. But the breakout hit from the
Speaker 1: Egyptian pavilion was a song that actually everybody in America
Speaker 1: probably knows, which is called The Streets of Cairo. Was
Speaker 1: written in New York by I believe Saul Bloom, Jewish
Speaker 1: Tim Penalty kind of songwriter, and everybody knows it because
Speaker 1: it goes dad, there's a place in France where the
Speaker 1: naked ladies dance, there's a hole in the wall where
Speaker 1: the boys can see at all. There just some variation
Speaker 1: of those lyrics that it's probably most everybody learned on
Speaker 1: the school playground at some point, but that's where the
Speaker 1: melody comes from. It was the breakout hit of the
Speaker 1: turk An Egyptian pavilions at the World's Fair and was
Speaker 1: what was danced to what was then referred to as
Speaker 1: the Hoochie Coochie dance. By this dance a little egypt
Speaker 1: the hoochie coochie dance being what we now call belly dancing,
Speaker 1: and wound up becoming shorthand for the entirety of the
Speaker 1: Middle East. Just a few bars of reference of that
Speaker 1: in a cartoon means it's from the Middle East somewhere.
Speaker 1: But the song itself, apparently Bloom may have lifted or
Speaker 1: plagiarized a song that was probably goes back to Algeria,
Speaker 1: but that's how it winds up coming into the American vernacular,
Speaker 1: and that was what Americans knew about Middle Eastern music
Speaker 1: for a long time. In an age of mass migration,
Speaker 1: the Statue of Liberty and Golden gate Bridge became global
Speaker 1: beacons to folks searching for a new home. So as
Speaker 1: with immigrants from almost every other part of the world
Speaker 1: who were having the end of the nineteenth century beginning
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century from all over the place. People
Speaker 1: are are being driven by, you know, financial hope, the
Speaker 1: image of itself that America broadcast to the world as
Speaker 1: a land of possibility. Meanwhile, back home, several other things
Speaker 1: are happening. Greece has serious financial trouble. The current crop fails,
Speaker 1: and there's just not a lot of money circulating around.
Speaker 1: So a young Greek man at the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth century, in order to
Speaker 1: get married, needs some money. The place to go to
Speaker 1: get that money is the United States. Now that's a
Speaker 1: Greek Man in Greece, a Greek Man in present day
Speaker 1: Turkey and Anatolia, of which there were tens hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1: There was another concern, which is that as an Ottoman subject, previously,
Speaker 1: as non Muslims, as ethnic minorities, they had not been
Speaker 1: required to perform military service. Ottoman law change and there
Speaker 1: was forced conscription of the ethnic minorities. Lots of young
Speaker 1: Christian and Jewish men thought to themselves, no, absolutely not.
Speaker 1: There is no way that we, having been second class
Speaker 1: citizens in particular four hundreds of years, are going to
Speaker 1: go fight your wars for you. It's out of the question.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of what happened was simply fleeing
Speaker 1: military conscription. So that's another thing. Then there are these
Speaker 1: conflicts at the end of the nineteenth century between the
Speaker 1: Ottoman military and the ethnic minorities, in particular with Armenians.
Speaker 1: There's a series of massacres that occur the end of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century where Armenians begin to get the idea
Speaker 1: that it is no longer tenable to remain under the
Speaker 1: Ottoman regime because thousands and thousands of people were being
Speaker 1: slaughtered by the military. So the Hammadian massacres as they're
Speaker 1: referred to, drove a lot of Armenians in particular out
Speaker 1: of the country. So then once you have a certain
Speaker 1: baseline number of immigrants in the United States from a
Speaker 1: certain location, they begin building communities actively trying to bring
Speaker 1: over more people. End of the nineteenth the beginning of
Speaker 1: the twenteth century is this massive wave of immigration from
Speaker 1: all over the place. Around New York City, a thousand
Speaker 1: human beings a day, we're entering just through Ellis Island.
Speaker 1: In one city in America, a thousand people a day
Speaker 1: are coming in and true to form a new population
Speaker 1: in America meant a new audience to sell stuff too.
Speaker 1: The record companies, particularly the two big record companies Victor
Speaker 1: Records later became our Cia later became BMG later became Sony,
Speaker 1: and Columbia Records later became Sony. Two burgeoning record company.
Speaker 1: These that are just growing exponentially year by year, are
Speaker 1: looking at all of this growth and going like, hey,
Speaker 1: I wonder if they buy any records. I wonder if
Speaker 1: we can sell them some stuff, you know. So they
Speaker 1: start trying to market records to the immigrants, and it
Speaker 1: works pretty quick. The first way that it works is
Speaker 1: to get material that was recorded by sister companies overseas
Speaker 1: and marketed to the immigrants. That works. Then the record
Speaker 1: companies A and R men would try to scout out
Speaker 1: what they thought were talented people that the immigrants would
Speaker 1: want to hear. Because the record company exects think they
Speaker 1: know best. They think they know what people would want
Speaker 1: to hear, and it tends to be aspiring, classy kind
Speaker 1: of music. The people don't buy that stuff so much.
Speaker 1: What the immigrants mostly want to hear, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: is funky, down home stuff, stuff that reminds them of
Speaker 1: good times and parties and you know, the village, and
Speaker 1: songs that are nostalgic and important to them from where
Speaker 1: they came from. The record companies finally get it through
Speaker 1: their heads. They finally start to realize what we really
Speaker 1: need to do here is go into the communities and ask,
Speaker 1: do you know anybody who plays like back Home? And
Speaker 1: that stuff starts being recorded in the Manhattan Recording studios
Speaker 1: late team's early twenties, and the people are buying it,
Speaker 1: the companies are making money, and for a while, everybody's happy.
Speaker 1: The first record ever made for an Arabic speaking population
Speaker 1: in the United States was a recording for Victor Records
Speaker 1: from by a guy named Alexander meldoeuf Malouf had already
Speaker 1: published a couple of pieces as sheet music, but he
Speaker 1: makes a couple of sides for Victor. One is called
Speaker 1: a Trip to Syria and the other is a performance
Speaker 1: called El Jazi Year, a song that is still played
Speaker 1: in Turkey and Syria. Actually, it's a very popular melody
Speaker 1: and seems to refer to military campaigns of the Ottoman
Speaker 1: Empire in Northwest Africa. And he's playing in a style
Speaker 1: that we recognize as being not dissimilar from ragtime or
Speaker 1: for that matter, Debucy and French impressionists. He was second generation,
Speaker 1: He was born in the US, and his entire career
Speaker 1: is marked to a great extent by this assimilation, this
Speaker 1: hybridization process, making a music that is authentic to himself
Speaker 1: as both an American as a Syrian person. After he
Speaker 1: makes this record, he winds up starting his own record
Speaker 1: label and aloof records, which functioned out of Washington Street
Speaker 1: in uh downtown Manhattan what's now Tribeca. There was a
Speaker 1: strip of Washington that was called Little Syria for decades,
Speaker 1: and that's where all the Arabic speaking people in Manhattan
Speaker 1: kind of were clustered together and had stores. Malouf's record
Speaker 1: label was not actually the only record label on that street.
Speaker 1: There was another guy, a J. Mac Sud, who was
Speaker 1: a copt from Egypt who had his own record label
Speaker 1: and put out superb wonderful, beautiful sounding and looking discs
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties. One of the kind of main
Speaker 1: musical denizens of Little Syria is an extraordinary violinist guy
Speaker 1: who recorded for a bunch of stuff in the mid
Speaker 1: teens for Colombia and then winds up going and recording
Speaker 1: as an accompanist on a whole bunch of stuff for
Speaker 1: a J. Mac SuDS label. He was a guy born
Speaker 1: a Lepo named dim Caricom. By the end of his
Speaker 1: life he winds up connecting with a guy named Ahmed
Speaker 1: Abdul Melik, a bass player and a jazz musician. He
Speaker 1: was for a long time, including through most of the fifties,
Speaker 1: bass player fourth Looneous monk Ahmad Abdul Melik gets this
Speaker 1: idea in his head that he wants to create a
Speaker 1: hybridized Near Eastern Jazz us. I'm an Abdomelique hires Naine Carracan,
Speaker 1: who's at this point well into his sixties, to record
Speaker 1: on a record in Night m his last performance on
Speaker 1: record absolutely tearing it up on violin in the same
Speaker 1: way he did when he first starts recording fourteen for Columbia.
Speaker 1: Before coming to America, Nain Caracand may have studied with
Speaker 1: the father and teacher of one of his Syrian contemporaries,
Speaker 1: Samuel Chawa. Samuel Chawa was the most important violinist of
Speaker 1: the entire Arab world during the teens and twenties, and
Speaker 1: he's still well remembered. There's a big retrospective box set
Speaker 1: that came out recently of of Samuel Chawa. Samuel Chawa's
Speaker 1: repertoire is almost identical to Naim Carracans like their style
Speaker 1: and the actual tunes they play and the way they
Speaker 1: play them are very very close. But the Arab world
Speaker 1: remembers Samuel Chawa. Nobody remembers Naim Carracan. Maybe the worst
Speaker 1: thing Naim Carracan could have done, for the sake of posterity,
Speaker 1: for the sake of the memory of of his talent,
Speaker 1: was moved to the US. If he had just gone
Speaker 1: to Beyrout or Cairo instead, there might be books on
Speaker 1: Naim Carracan, there might be seedy box set retrospectives. He
Speaker 1: went to a place that would never appreciate him. As
Speaker 1: the teens in twenties progressed on, immigrant artists were proving
Speaker 1: to be good business, but at the major labels, a
Speaker 1: xenophobic sentiment dictated the way these records were being branded.
Speaker 1: The record companies start up series in their catalogs. Columbia
Speaker 1: Records starts an E series for ethnic. They later change
Speaker 1: it to the F series for foreign. Just as they
Speaker 1: had a series of what we're called Race Records, which
Speaker 1: were records they were marketing to black folks. Anybody who's
Speaker 1: speaking of foreign language, who isn't playing Western classical art
Speaker 1: music gets stuck within those catalogs within that series, no
Speaker 1: matter whether they're playing some kind of like rural hillbilly
Speaker 1: music or whether they're classically trained rich person singing some
Speaker 1: fancy art music. Columbia and Victor have no idea which
Speaker 1: is which basically, it's all just ethnic or foreign. Much
Speaker 1: of the material for these catalogs was produced at Columbia's
Speaker 1: New York studio inside the Woolworth Building on Broadway. It
Speaker 1: was at the time the tallest building in the United States.
Speaker 1: Musicians could get in the elevator and go up to
Speaker 1: the recording studio, I believe on the thirteen floor. It
Speaker 1: must have been very intense. The recording engineers had a
Speaker 1: system where they would show you a colored card or
Speaker 1: a colored light to tell you when to begin. They
Speaker 1: would show you another colored card or another colored light
Speaker 1: to tell you when you had thirty seconds left to
Speaker 1: wrap it up for the end of the side, and
Speaker 1: then the color changes once again. And that's the end
Speaker 1: of the side. Because you can only fit about three
Speaker 1: minutes and thirty seconds tops onto a side of a disk,
Speaker 1: that's it. So you have to have pre rehearsed and
Speaker 1: timed out the piece. Now you know a lot of
Speaker 1: these performers would play a piece for seven, eight twenty minutes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of these people who are playing dance songs.
Speaker 1: You know, this is party stuff. Or maybe there were
Speaker 1: extra verses. You know, maybe the song goes on for
Speaker 1: you know, six minutes, but you got three and a half.
Speaker 1: Do it or don't, and so you have to tie
Speaker 1: out your performance beforehand and show up at the recording
Speaker 1: studio ready to do it. Immigrant performers were generally given
Speaker 1: one take and that was it. Mariko papagicas Smerneco was
Speaker 1: recorded in July in that building. The Papagica record is
Speaker 1: extraordinary because she took three takes to do it, very
Speaker 1: very unusual. I don't know how or why that happened,
Speaker 1: but it certainly paid off. When you hear that first
Speaker 1: note that she sings, that doesn't come from nowhere, That's
Speaker 1: a note that somebody worked on a Why the company
Speaker 1: let her try it over and over, we don't know.
Speaker 1: Because everything else she recorded that day she recorded in
Speaker 1: one take. She did record the same piece seven months
Speaker 1: earlier for Victor Records a few blocks away. That record
Speaker 1: actually sold better, circulated more, and copies of that are
Speaker 1: are available a little bit, but they're not as good.
Speaker 1: Same performance, exact, same arrangement. Everybody plays exactly the same
Speaker 1: note at the same time, but it doesn't have the thing.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have the Fire that Columbia version that she
Speaker 1: did July, of which, to the best of my knowledge,
Speaker 1: less than five copies exist now of that record. It
Speaker 1: did not sell. Mario Papagico was somebody who overtly attempted
Speaker 1: to cross over into kind of like a hybridized mainstream
Speaker 1: Americanized style, and she recorded a bunch of material not
Speaker 1: with a traditional Turkish or Greek style band, but with
Speaker 1: pop orchestra, including some stuff that mentions like having your
Speaker 1: hair bobbed or iron in your hair, you know, americanized things,
Speaker 1: cars and electricity, stuff that was new for immigrants. She
Speaker 1: was actively attempting to appeal to an American eye, a
Speaker 1: sense among Greeks, a sense of being assimilated into American culture.
Speaker 1: One of the people that she was involved with was
Speaker 1: a record producer at Victor Records. He ran there Foreign
Speaker 1: an Ethnic series for a while. His name was Tetos Demitrioti's.
Speaker 1: He had a great ear new talent and stayed in
Speaker 1: the record business for decades and decades and decades. Demitriots
Speaker 1: was a young guy from Constantinople. He was Greek and
Speaker 1: very cosmopolitan in his view of music, A real lover
Speaker 1: of music. I think he was himself a singer, not
Speaker 1: a great singer, but serviceable, perfectly fine. He was a
Speaker 1: nice looking guy. But his big hit record, which he
Speaker 1: re recorded several times and republished a sheet music and
Speaker 1: you know, really milked as much as he could. It
Speaker 1: was a song that really took the public imagination for decades,
Speaker 1: called miser Loop, which means little Egyptian Girl. All that
Speaker 1: name he recorded at first, Well, it becomes a song
Speaker 1: that's played by klezmer bands in the forties and fifties,
Speaker 1: and it winds up being performed by singers of the
Speaker 1: classic American songbook with new lyrics in English Desert Chattels,
Speaker 1: Three Books, Purple sid and then you know, it winds
Speaker 1: up being covered by Dick Dale and the Dell Tones
Speaker 1: for one, and eventually used the theme song for the
Speaker 1: movie Pulp Fiction. So Demitrioti's interest in americanizing Greek music
Speaker 1: winds up happening in this way that he never could
Speaker 1: have predicted. Now it's been pointed out that Dick Dale's
Speaker 1: uncle was an OWD player, and that his surf guitar
Speaker 1: style of this you know, fluttering kind of right hand
Speaker 1: picking technique, it was most likely derived in some way
Speaker 1: from his uncle's food playing and that surf guitar, the
Speaker 1: ventures and all that kind of stuff comes partially from
Speaker 1: exposure to immigrants from the Near East, Lebanese and Armenian players,
Speaker 1: in particular, lots and lots of them in California. Fresno
Speaker 1: was largely built by Armenians. So why can these records
Speaker 1: be so hard to find now? Well, in the first place,
Speaker 1: they weren't necessarily minted in vast quantities. A good selling
Speaker 1: ethnic or foreign record in the nineteen teams or twenties
Speaker 1: is selling three hundred to three thousand copies roughly. You know,
Speaker 1: three thousand is quite good. Three d is a bit disappointing.
Speaker 1: There are certainly examples on the books of records that
Speaker 1: only sold twelve copies or thirty copies or something. But
Speaker 1: the records that were produced have a long shelf life
Speaker 1: due to their composition, of which shellac is not the
Speaker 1: main ingredient. They're made of about ten to fifteen percent shelack.
Speaker 1: What they're mostly made of, the records is about ground stone.
Speaker 1: Then there's added to that, you know, some carbon blacks,
Speaker 1: so they're uniformly black, so you've got a consistent looking product.
Speaker 1: Some cotton fiber is binder, but they're basically stones. They
Speaker 1: will blast for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: If they're not worn out by being played, or if
Speaker 1: they're not abused, are neglected, they'll last a very very
Speaker 1: long time, much much longer than you or me or
Speaker 1: anybody who will ever remember us. The conditions that made
Speaker 1: these recordings so rare. That confluence of factors again gets
Speaker 1: tangled in questions of American identity. Okay, Grandma and Grandpa
Speaker 1: came from the old Country, and they accumulated a little
Speaker 1: stack of this old country music that they would listen
Speaker 1: to sometimes when they're feeling nostalgic or parties or something.
Speaker 1: Mom and Dad grew up in this house and they
Speaker 1: heard those records sometimes, but it's not their music. They
Speaker 1: were Americans. They grew up with American music and tried
Speaker 1: to be more American, and they didn't really connect with
Speaker 1: the music. Now, Grandma and Grandpa died and lady left
Speaker 1: behind these records, and the record stuck around in the
Speaker 1: attic or the basement, and then Mom and Dad are
Speaker 1: getting up there, and now we've got to find a
Speaker 1: thing to do with these records. So what do you do.
Speaker 1: You've seen antique road show. You know, there's such a
Speaker 1: thing as people who like this old stuff. They're antiques.
Speaker 1: They're antiques, right, Somebody wants these, So you go you
Speaker 1: find yourself a nerd. You go find yourself a record collector.
Speaker 1: Not easy to do, but there he is. He shows up,
Speaker 1: He looks through your records and he goes, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not really what I'm looking for. I don't collect foreign.
Speaker 1: It's an actual line from the movie Ghost World. I
Speaker 1: don't really collect That's what they all said for years.
Speaker 1: I don't collect foreign. Nobody did. What record collectors collected
Speaker 1: was stuff that had to do with the story of America, country, blues, jazz, gospel,
Speaker 1: and so that's what the seventy collectors were looking for.
Speaker 1: But the immigrants stuff, the ethnic stuff. The record collector
Speaker 1: is standing there in your living room with your grandparents
Speaker 1: records in his hand, and he hands them back to
Speaker 1: you and he goes, sorry, it's nothing here. I can
Speaker 1: use really dollar apiece now, sorry, it's just I don't
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody wants these. So then what happens
Speaker 1: to them? Will you throw them away? They're junk? If
Speaker 1: that guy doesn't want them, nobody he wants them, right,
Speaker 1: maybe you try them on eBay. Not many people buying
Speaker 1: them on eBay. You know, it's the hardly worth boxing
Speaker 1: and up for you know, a dollar or two a piece.
Speaker 1: It's this broader cultural sense of America, as American culture
Speaker 1: doesn't include all this stuff that happened in foreign languages
Speaker 1: or vernacular, foreign ideas. That has led to the scarcity
Speaker 1: of their records because there just hasn't been a broader
Speaker 1: conversation about the value of them. There hasn't been a
Speaker 1: a guess culturally that that they matter, so they get
Speaker 1: thrown in the garbage. Rescuing a work before he gets
Speaker 1: thrown in the garbage is, of course, only the first step.
Speaker 1: These records come laden with questions, and even the most
Speaker 1: dogged diligent research sometimes leads to a dead end. Some
Speaker 1: of these people, I've been able to dig up biographical information.
Speaker 1: I've been able to get a sense of who they
Speaker 1: were and what they accomplished, and what their lives were like,
Speaker 1: where they were from, at least when they were born,
Speaker 1: when they died or something. This is a guy, for instance,
Speaker 1: that I don't think we'll ever really know anything that
Speaker 1: much about he made a few dozen records for both
Speaker 1: Colombia and Victor in the nineteen teens, and then he
Speaker 1: just vanishes. No idea where he went. We don't know
Speaker 1: where he came from, and we probably never will. The
Speaker 1: name that he uses on the labels of the records
Speaker 1: is the reason we won't know. The name is Kim Animanas.
Speaker 1: Menas is just real common last name, and Kemeny is
Speaker 1: just an honorific It just means very good violinist. So
Speaker 1: there's really kind of no way to look up a
Speaker 1: guy like that. This is his masterpiece. This is his
Speaker 1: best performance. They're all good. He never made a bad record,
Speaker 1: but this is the great one. Y nagging be yea
Speaker 1: yeah day yah yeah. This is a record from v
Speaker 1: that's a description of the destruction of the village of
Speaker 1: Aigan dam redidi j. Aigan was way out in eastern
Speaker 1: Turkey near the Review Frates, and Aigan was systemically destroyed.
Speaker 1: A third of the population was killed and half of
Speaker 1: the homes were burned by the Ottoman government as part
Speaker 1: of the Hammadian massacres in direct retaliation for the political
Speaker 1: action of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. This song is a
Speaker 1: direct account remembered by our Armenian immigrants to the United
Speaker 1: States of that tragedy a day. Yeah, it's a super performance,
Speaker 1: one of the most wonderful vocal performances I've ever heard
Speaker 1: in my life. And the record sold like absolute hotcakes.
Speaker 1: I mean, thousands and thousands of copies. Gid up. It's
Speaker 1: an incredibly easy record to get, and it's worth almost nothing.
Speaker 1: I think you probably get like a beautiful copy on
Speaker 1: eBay right now for like ten bucks. But it's a jewel.
Speaker 1: It's a real masterpiece and we'll never know who he was. Yet.
Speaker 1: Not every track that Canary has reissued qualifies as rare.
Speaker 1: For instance, one disc that's abundantly available paints a biting
Speaker 1: portrayal of life in the US. One of the very
Speaker 1: first records in Turkish that I ever bought was a
Speaker 1: record called nt Him Get Him amry Kaya. I'm pronouncing
Speaker 1: that wrong. I pronounced everything wrong because I only speak English.
Speaker 1: I've owned maybe seven eight copies of this record over
Speaker 1: the years, like you find it all over the place.
Speaker 1: The first one I bought was fifty cents, and I
Speaker 1: don't think I've paid much more for one since then.
Speaker 1: It turns up all over the place it was made
Speaker 1: in for Columbia. It's a twelve inch disc, meaning it
Speaker 1: was a dollar twenty five at the time, a much
Speaker 1: more expensive record, and must have sold tens of thousands,
Speaker 1: potentially a hundred thousand copies, probably to every Turkish speaking
Speaker 1: household in the United States at the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties. The guy who made it was a Greek
Speaker 1: guy from northwest present day Turkey. His name is Achilles Pulos.
Speaker 1: He was a good dude player. He was a party guy.
Speaker 1: Every Polo story includes some amount of drinking and boozing.
Speaker 1: Poulos and his wife owned a little nightclub around forty
Speaker 1: one eighth Avenue, and during Prohibition they got shut down
Speaker 1: by the cops for selling booze. The cops shut down
Speaker 1: the place and throw Polos in the tombs for a
Speaker 1: couple of nights. He gets out, opens up another place
Speaker 1: exactly Cateacorner, and goes right back to doing what he
Speaker 1: was doing. But it was a place where you could
Speaker 1: go in, you could get a coffee cup full of
Speaker 1: booze and listen to a guy play songs from home.
Speaker 1: Achilles puloss biggest hit was this song, let Him Get
Speaker 1: Him Americaya, which means why I came to America. It
Speaker 1: seems to be his own lyrics to a an older
Speaker 1: traditional song that he knew, and the song is about
Speaker 1: regretting the choice to have come to the United States
Speaker 1: so cruel? Why do you make us suffer? I wish
Speaker 1: I never came, never saw? This is part of what
Speaker 1: he sings in it all. John bitch All, John oh
Speaker 1: Sy Achilles Pullos records prolifically songs in about five years,
Speaker 1: and then the depression hits nine and he just disappears,
Speaker 1: just gone. There's just no more Achilles Polos records. Just
Speaker 1: strange for somebody who sold so many records and seemed
Speaker 1: to be had been so popular. And so the story
Speaker 1: circulated that he had been ratted out to immigration services
Speaker 1: for having made this record, for having made something so
Speaker 1: disrespectful to America. America was deporting a lot of people
Speaker 1: in the twenties for almost any reason. It wasn't hard
Speaker 1: to trump up something to make you look like a
Speaker 1: criminal and send you back on your way. The story
Speaker 1: is circulated for decades that that's what happened to Pulos. Well,
Speaker 1: as I began looking into Pulos a little bit more.
Speaker 1: It turns out, no, he didn't go back to Turkey.
Speaker 1: He went somewhere else. He went to Connecticut, h I
Speaker 1: went to work for a coffee roaster, and he's buried there.
Speaker 1: He died there in the nineteen seventies. Apparently he had
Speaker 1: arthritis and it got hard to play, and I think
Speaker 1: the drinking thing didn't help. So we only get about
Speaker 1: five years of Achille Polos's life on record, unfortunately, including
Speaker 1: this like Monster, Monster Hit Here Get that's one of
Speaker 1: the most important commentaries on the immigrant life in America
Speaker 1: at the time. I think in many of these performances,
Speaker 1: the lyrics course with anxiety and fear. In the nine twenties,
Speaker 1: that was in some part reflective of mounting changes in
Speaker 1: US immigration policy. For a very long time in the
Speaker 1: United States, there's simply were no laws restricting immigration. If
Speaker 1: you can make it, you're in. End of the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century is the Chinese Exclusion Act. United States specifically decides
Speaker 1: there's a group of people we don't like and we
Speaker 1: don't trust, and we don't think are part of us,
Speaker 1: and we're not letting any more of them. In most
Speaker 1: of America was behind that idea opened a huge can
Speaker 1: of worms. In the U S government passed the Johnson
Speaker 1: Read Act, which established quotas based on nation of origin
Speaker 1: in immigration. The quotas were basically set up so that
Speaker 1: America would stay percentage wise exactly the color of white
Speaker 1: that the nation had been fifty years earlier, the same
Speaker 1: percent tage of Germans, the same percentage of English, the
Speaker 1: same percentage of Irish, to maintain a particular racial profile
Speaker 1: for the country. From onward, lots of Scandinavians were allowed,
Speaker 1: lots of Germans, lots of English, lots of French, fewer Italians,
Speaker 1: fewer Polls, very few Syrians, Greeks, Turks, no one from Africa,
Speaker 1: and no one from Asian period for four decades, that
Speaker 1: remained the situation for immigrants in the United States. It's
Speaker 1: not that they couldn't have come, it's that we said,
Speaker 1: we don't want our country to look like that, and
Speaker 1: the result for people who had come from the Ottoman
Speaker 1: Empire was that their families couldn't come anymore, and it
Speaker 1: broke families up. Godsia I have bid us I bed us.
Speaker 1: This is a record made about twenty seven thereabouts called gukas,
Speaker 1: which means where do you come from a shot shot
Speaker 1: why not. It was recorded for the Pharaohs Record Company
Speaker 1: by a guy named Nishan kill Jackian who was a
Speaker 1: land surveyor for the city of Medford. He didn't record
Speaker 1: very much, but he did make this one I think
Speaker 1: very important record because it is, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: the only Armenian record that directly protests something. And what
Speaker 1: it's directly protesting is the Johnson Read Act the problem
Speaker 1: of Armanian families being separated by immigration cours. I got,
Speaker 1: I got a prisoner, but there is no singular experience
Speaker 1: verified by just how eclectic emigrat catalogs could be. There
Speaker 1: were songs of hardship, songs of protest, and nihilistic party songs.
Speaker 1: Another performer that I've been looking into specifically as a
Speaker 1: personality and as a biography is Edward Begoesian. Yet Vartoi
Speaker 1: Bogosian was like a good time guy, a fun guy,
Speaker 1: party guy, kind of a drunk uncle type. I guess
Speaker 1: you could say. He was born nine hundred in Constantinople,
Speaker 1: arrives in the us UH and tours around as a comedian.
Speaker 1: He's a clown the stage show where he sings funny,
Speaker 1: almost dirty songs. Some of his songs are things about
Speaker 1: like gambling and like don't trust your husbands, and you know,
Speaker 1: stuff about people manipulating each other for immigration status, you know,
Speaker 1: all kinds of you know, fun cynical kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: Starts recording for Pharaos Records in the twenties, go silent
Speaker 1: through the depression, and starts recording again in the early
Speaker 1: forties for a little independent company that was marketing records
Speaker 1: to Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Albanian, Ladino speaking immigrants. Remember this
Speaker 1: is almost twenty years to the Johnson read Act. These
Speaker 1: are people who barely remember whom. These are people for
Speaker 1: whom you know, the past is back. There are ways
Speaker 1: And this song was his biggest hit, who was massively popular.
Speaker 1: Song called man then said I and the lyrics basically go,
Speaker 1: you know you can't trust anybody in this life. Don't
Speaker 1: believe what people tell you me. I like to eat,
Speaker 1: I like to drink booze, I like to have a
Speaker 1: good time. Keith is the word means stoned in Turkish,
Speaker 1: but in Armenian it basically just means like laid back,
Speaker 1: relaxed times kes And then comes the big single long
Speaker 1: chorus which means in English, it's fake. It's fake, it's fake,
Speaker 1: it steake, everything is fake in Armenian. Buddy of mine,
Speaker 1: when I first told him that I was interested in
Speaker 1: this song, he goes like, you know, come on, He's like, look,
Speaker 1: if you're like me and you go to a lot
Speaker 1: of Armenian events, it's like having a gel. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a cliche, like I'm so used to hearing drunk
Speaker 1: uncle's playing the song. But for such a cliche, there
Speaker 1: are no copies of this record online. You can't go
Speaker 1: hear this record unless you have a seventy eight of it.
Speaker 1: That's it. It hasn't circulated in seventy years almost, and
Speaker 1: it's a massive, great hit song of its time. Do
Speaker 1: you feel kind of like a yeah, a gate keeper
Speaker 1: holding these personal stories. I'm not keeping them. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to get rid of them as fast as I can.
Speaker 1: I have taken them on and have tried to learn
Speaker 1: them in as much detail and to be able to
Speaker 1: tell them as best I can. But I don't want
Speaker 1: to have to keep them. They belong to other people
Speaker 1: more than they do to me. Please ease do something
Speaker 1: with him, because I won't be here all that long.
Speaker 1: And the stories and the ideas and the performers and
Speaker 1: the performances, those have got to stay for a while
Speaker 1: longer than me. Hopefully the last artist will play here
Speaker 1: is the first I heard from the Canary collection, and
Speaker 1: indeed my introduction to this sliver of history, this moment
Speaker 1: that time forgot. The voice of Zabel Pennosian haunts me.
Speaker 1: It haunts Ian as it has haunted countless more. Isabel
Speaker 1: Pennosian recorded only about a dozen performances over the course
Speaker 1: of about a year in Zabel Pennosian was born in
Speaker 1: northeastern Anatolia immigrants, comes through France and then comes to
Speaker 1: the US, where she settles in Boston. She's classically trained,
Speaker 1: performs with the short lived Boston an Opera Company. Winds
Speaker 1: up making this series of records for Colombia in New
Speaker 1: York in the teens, and then she tours around for
Speaker 1: some years in the United States raising money for the
Speaker 1: Near East Relief Campaign, the first massive philanthropic project in
Speaker 1: the United States, raised millions and millions and millions of
Speaker 1: dollars for people who were suffering in Turkey and Syria.
Speaker 1: Then she winds up touring all over Europe for a
Speaker 1: couple of the decades really and is a huge star
Speaker 1: playing all these fancy opera houses. She comes back to
Speaker 1: the US basically becomes a quiet, private citizen. None of
Speaker 1: her kids have kids, so she has no direct descendants.
Speaker 1: There are still living nieces and nephews who never knew
Speaker 1: that their aunt was a musician at all. But she
Speaker 1: recorded one of the definitive Armenian songs of the first
Speaker 1: part of the twentieth century, a record that tour people's
Speaker 1: hearts out and sold like crazy for decades. The song
Speaker 1: is called Grunk Means Cream. It's a melody that she
Speaker 1: actually remembers from childhood, and she seems to have basically
Speaker 1: composed and arranged this song herself. The reason it was
Speaker 1: such a huge hit in the US was that the
Speaker 1: lyrics are basically crane. Do you have any news from home?
Speaker 1: Please don't run back, There'll be enough time. I want
Speaker 1: to know what's happening back home with my people. That's
Speaker 1: the basic gist of the lyrics. The conflicts between Armenians
Speaker 1: and the Turkish Ottoman government had escalated to a point
Speaker 1: where the Turkish government had decided to simply solve the problem,
Speaker 1: and they did so in this systemic way. The Ottoman
Speaker 1: government had rounded up a million, million and a half
Speaker 1: Armenians out of their villages and begun marching them southward
Speaker 1: into the Syrian desert, where they died of famine first exposure.
Speaker 1: It was the first genocide of the twentieth century. It
Speaker 1: was the event for which the term genocide was invented.
Speaker 1: Armenians who were in the United States, therefore, we're in
Speaker 1: a situation where they were desperate for news about home.
Speaker 1: Not only had the government confiscated their homes, their land,
Speaker 1: their rugs, their money, whatever they left behind. Also, to
Speaker 1: their great horror, reports began coming in that everyone they
Speaker 1: ever knew was dead, and there was no home to
Speaker 1: go back to anymore. There simply was nowhere left, that
Speaker 1: is whom, Nothing that they remembered could ever be repeated,
Speaker 1: and almost everybody you knew was gone. So drunk was
Speaker 1: the perfect distillation of that horror and sorrow and desperation
Speaker 1: of being stranded as an Armenian in the United States.
Speaker 1: Immediately after the genocide, Genocide is record comes out. Now
Speaker 1: This record was again a huge hit, sold thousands of copies.
Speaker 1: When I first in countered it about I'd never heard
Speaker 1: of it or her, and there was nothing to find out.
Speaker 1: There was nobody to ask. The record had never been
Speaker 1: written about once by anybody in any book. There wasn't
Speaker 1: such a thing as Abell Pennosian in cultural memory. So
Speaker 1: I began looking and looking looking, and then a couple
Speaker 1: of buddies of mine got interested and joined in, and
Speaker 1: they wound up turning up a bunch of Armenian language
Speaker 1: newspapers and magazines and stuff from the old days that
Speaker 1: did include some details. And so gradually we've gotten a
Speaker 1: full picture of Zabelle's life, and we're going to be
Speaker 1: able to tell her whole story of who she was
Speaker 1: and what she accomplished. It's really just because these records
Speaker 1: stick around and because they're made a stone. And it
Speaker 1: mattered immensely that this song continued to live. I couldn't
Speaker 1: understand how it could have been forgotten for so long. Somehow,
Speaker 1: having this woman's voice as an American immigrant, as a refugee,
Speaker 1: I think it matters to America that she gets to
Speaker 1: be heard. I think it matters to music students that
Speaker 1: they should know that this song exists, might change how
Speaker 1: they think about themselves. Remembers the Bell's records were made
Speaker 1: and marketed as ethnic records. These were not marketed as
Speaker 1: read label classical records for fancy people, but they are.
Speaker 1: She may have been, I think, seriously discouraged by the
Speaker 1: fact that she was ghetto wized as a as an immigrant,
Speaker 1: as an ethnic performer. Maybe that's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: she didn't record anymore in the US. We don't know
Speaker 1: working it out. The stories of these performers lives. The
Speaker 1: brief glimpses we've been afforded, like the songs themselves, have
Speaker 1: a timeless quality, but the lessons are perhaps more relevant
Speaker 1: than ever. There are certainly forces in America right now
Speaker 1: that are attempting to limit the definition of American nous
Speaker 1: that includes American creativity, and they're using a skewed version
Speaker 1: of history and a skewed sense of American identity to
Speaker 1: do it. If all you know about America and the
Speaker 1: history of immigration to this country over the past hundred
Speaker 1: years is this tiny little bit of images and ideas
Speaker 1: that you get in a kind of public education, you'll
Speaker 1: be easily swayed. So I think it's extremely important, just
Speaker 1: generally for Americans to look honestly and clearly at who
Speaker 1: we are and what we've done. The fact of the
Speaker 1: matter is it's it's kind of great. It's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun. And I don't know that much about history.
Speaker 1: I'm not the best read person in the world. What
Speaker 1: I do know is that music is great. Music is
Speaker 1: always really, really, really good. And whenever anybody's playing music,
Speaker 1: they're not doing anything wrong, They're only doing something right.
Speaker 1: To look at American music and what American musicians have
Speaker 1: accomplished is also always good and always a pleasure. It's
Speaker 1: the reverse of the kind of oppression and the kind
Speaker 1: of fear and anger that we see bubbling around in
Speaker 1: the in the culture. Records are great. I really like
Speaker 1: old records along, Yeah me too. Ephemeral is written and
Speaker 1: assembled by me and produced by any Reese, Matt Frederick,
Speaker 1: and Tristan McNeil, with technical assistance from Sherry Larson. Our
Speaker 1: hats off to Ian Nagaski for doing extraordinary work and
Speaker 1: for being so generous with his time. This conversation was
Speaker 1: inspired by the compilation to What Strange Place the Music
Speaker 1: of the Ottoman American Diaspora. You can find it all
Speaker 1: these songs and more at Canary Dash Records, Dot band
Speaker 1: camp dot com and a little something about us at
Speaker 1: ephemeral dot Shows in the world, Lad and Medium podcast
Speaker 1: and I I Media our podcast. Are you using your
Speaker 1: favorite chist