Diaspora

music researcher and record producer near Baltimore, Maryland. A little bit more than a decade now, I've been doing reissue records of old stuff and languages that I don't speak. Through his label, Canary Records, Ian has reissued all kinds of forgotten treasures, early American gospel, untraceable East Asian pop songs, recordings of wild birds, works that were almost forgotten. Some

stuff he's literally pulled out of garbage cans. But of all of his projects, one is the pre eminent focus songs of Near and Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States, what I've been calling Ottoman diaspora music Ottoman as in the Ottoman Empire, which, like the Soviet Union, is an entity that no longer exists, but exerted a powerful force on the tides of history. Disclaimer, Well, I have to say that I'm not a an Ottomanist historian and academic

or anything like that. There's a lot that you could get wrong. It's like saying, so what was ancient Rome? But the Ottoman Empire roughly was a huge swath of territory that expanded and contracted over about five hundred years, following the Byzantine Empire, which had succeeded the Roman Empire. It was founded by Turks, Turkic people from Central Asia who had migrated into what is present day Turkey Anatolia.

They wound up conquering all of Anatolia, then conquered upward through almost all the Balkans up to the Danube River. In Mozart's grandparents time, they were knocking on the doorstep of the Austro Hungarian Empire. The Ottoman Empire then extended eastward all the way to Persia, southward along the Red Sea on both sides Egypt, down to Yemen, and then

across almost all of North Africa. So a huge swath of of the world around the Mediterranean and what's now the Middle East, and it continued for about five hundred years. Starting in the early mid nineteenth century, territory started falling away pretty fast. Greece want its independence, and then more and more territories begin to secede, and the ethnic minorities are rising up in various ways. They're become huge military problems for the Empire, with the Russian Empire bearing down

from the north. The First World War happens, there are a series of coups, there are huge financial debts, and the Empire finally comes apart shortly after the First World War and becomes now what is just the present day Republic of Turkey and a number of other countries, Syria, Bulgaria, lots of places were Ottoman for a very long time. You might think you've never heard music from this distant land, or that if you had, you certainly couldn't hum a

few bars of it, But you'd be wrong. The first commercial recordings in the Turkish language occur under the ages of mg Prozekian ve but first recordings in Turkish and Arabic in the US generally occur at the Chicago World's Face in at that World's Fair. There were a number of pavilions. There was a Turkish pavilion and a Egyptian pavilion, and a Moroccan pavilion, for instance, so that people in Chicago could experience these cultures, and there were continuous performances

of musicians and dancers. But the breakout hit from the Egyptian pavilion was a song that actually everybody in America probably knows, which is called The Streets of Cairo. Was written in New York by I believe Saul Bloom, Jewish Tim Penalty kind of songwriter, and everybody knows it because it goes dad, there's a place in France where the naked ladies dance, there's a hole in the wall where

the boys can see at all. There just some variation of those lyrics that it's probably most everybody learned on the school playground at some point, but that's where the melody comes from. It was the breakout hit of the turk An Egyptian pavilions at the World's Fair and was what was danced to what was then referred to as the Hoochie Coochie dance. By this dance a little egypt the hoochie coochie dance being what we now call belly dancing, and wound up becoming shorthand for the entirety of the

Middle East. Just a few bars of reference of that in a cartoon means it's from the Middle East somewhere. But the song itself, apparently Bloom may have lifted or plagiarized a song that was probably goes back to Algeria, but that's how it winds up coming into the American vernacular, and that was what Americans knew about Middle Eastern music for a long time. In an age of mass migration, the Statue of Liberty and Golden gate Bridge became global

beacons to folks searching for a new home. So as with immigrants from almost every other part of the world who were having the end of the nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth century from all over the place. People are are being driven by, you know, financial hope, the image of itself that America broadcast to the world as a land of possibility. Meanwhile, back home, several other things

are happening. Greece has serious financial trouble. The current crop fails, and there's just not a lot of money circulating around. So a young Greek man at the end of the nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth century, in order to get married, needs some money. The place to go to get that money is the United States. Now that's a Greek Man in Greece, a Greek Man in present day Turkey and Anatolia, of which there were tens hundreds of thousands.

There was another concern, which is that as an Ottoman subject, previously, as non Muslims, as ethnic minorities, they had not been required to perform military service. Ottoman law change and there was forced conscription of the ethnic minorities. Lots of young Christian and Jewish men thought to themselves, no, absolutely not. There is no way that we, having been second class citizens in particular four hundreds of years, are going to go fight your wars for you. It's out of the question.

And so a lot of what happened was simply fleeing military conscription. So that's another thing. Then there are these conflicts at the end of the nineteenth century between the Ottoman military and the ethnic minorities, in particular with Armenians. There's a series of massacres that occur the end of the nineteenth century where Armenians begin to get the idea that it is no longer tenable to remain under the Ottoman regime because thousands and thousands of people were being

slaughtered by the military. So the Hammadian massacres as they're referred to, drove a lot of Armenians in particular out of the country. So then once you have a certain baseline number of immigrants in the United States from a certain location, they begin building communities actively trying to bring over more people. End of the nineteenth the beginning of the twenteth century is this massive wave of immigration from

all over the place. Around New York City, a thousand human beings a day, we're entering just through Ellis Island. In one city in America, a thousand people a day are coming in and true to form a new population in America meant a new audience to sell stuff too. The record companies, particularly the two big record companies Victor Records later became our Cia later became BMG later became Sony, and Columbia Records later became Sony. Two burgeoning record company.

These that are just growing exponentially year by year, are looking at all of this growth and going like, hey, I wonder if they buy any records. I wonder if we can sell them some stuff, you know. So they start trying to market records to the immigrants, and it works pretty quick. The first way that it works is to get material that was recorded by sister companies overseas

and marketed to the immigrants. That works. Then the record companies A and R men would try to scout out what they thought were talented people that the immigrants would want to hear. Because the record company exects think they know best. They think they know what people would want to hear, and it tends to be aspiring, classy kind of music. The people don't buy that stuff so much.

What the immigrants mostly want to hear, as it turns out, is funky, down home stuff, stuff that reminds them of good times and parties and you know, the village, and songs that are nostalgic and important to them from where they came from. The record companies finally get it through their heads. They finally start to realize what we really need to do here is go into the communities and ask,

do you know anybody who plays like back Home? And that stuff starts being recorded in the Manhattan Recording studios late team's early twenties, and the people are buying it, the companies are making money, and for a while, everybody's happy. The first record ever made for an Arabic speaking population in the United States was a recording for Victor Records from by a guy named Alexander meldoeuf Malouf had already published a couple of pieces as sheet music, but he

makes a couple of sides for Victor. One is called a Trip to Syria and the other is a performance called El Jazi Year, a song that is still played in Turkey and Syria. Actually, it's a very popular melody and seems to refer to military campaigns of the Ottoman Empire in Northwest Africa. And he's playing in a style that we recognize as being not dissimilar from ragtime or

for that matter, Debucy and French impressionists. He was second generation, He was born in the US, and his entire career is marked to a great extent by this assimilation, this hybridization process, making a music that is authentic to himself as both an American as a Syrian person. After he makes this record, he winds up starting his own record label and aloof records, which functioned out of Washington Street

in uh downtown Manhattan what's now Tribeca. There was a strip of Washington that was called Little Syria for decades, and that's where all the Arabic speaking people in Manhattan kind of were clustered together and had stores. Malouf's record label was not actually the only record label on that street. There was another guy, a J. Mac Sud, who was a copt from Egypt who had his own record label and put out superb wonderful, beautiful sounding and looking discs

in the nineteen twenties. One of the kind of main musical denizens of Little Syria is an extraordinary violinist guy who recorded for a bunch of stuff in the mid teens for Colombia and then winds up going and recording as an accompanist on a whole bunch of stuff for a J. Mac SuDS label. He was a guy born a Lepo named dim Caricom. By the end of his life he winds up connecting with a guy named Ahmed

Abdul Melik, a bass player and a jazz musician. He was for a long time, including through most of the fifties, bass player fourth Looneous monk Ahmad Abdul Melik gets this idea in his head that he wants to create a

hybridized Near Eastern Jazz us. I'm an Abdomelique hires Naine Carracan, who's at this point well into his sixties, to record on a record in Night m his last performance on record absolutely tearing it up on violin in the same way he did when he first starts recording fourteen for Columbia. Before coming to America, Nain Caracand may have studied with the father and teacher of one of his Syrian contemporaries,

Samuel Chawa. Samuel Chawa was the most important violinist of the entire Arab world during the teens and twenties, and he's still well remembered. There's a big retrospective box set that came out recently of of Samuel Chawa. Samuel Chawa's repertoire is almost identical to Naim Carracans like their style and the actual tunes they play and the way they play them are very very close. But the Arab world

remembers Samuel Chawa. Nobody remembers Naim Carracan. Maybe the worst thing Naim Carracan could have done, for the sake of posterity, for the sake of the memory of of his talent, was moved to the US. If he had just gone to Beyrout or Cairo instead, there might be books on Naim Carracan, there might be seedy box set retrospectives. He

went to a place that would never appreciate him. As the teens in twenties progressed on, immigrant artists were proving to be good business, but at the major labels, a xenophobic sentiment dictated the way these records were being branded. The record companies start up series in their catalogs. Columbia Records starts an E series for ethnic. They later change it to the F series for foreign. Just as they had a series of what we're called Race Records, which

were records they were marketing to black folks. Anybody who's speaking of foreign language, who isn't playing Western classical art music gets stuck within those catalogs within that series, no matter whether they're playing some kind of like rural hillbilly music or whether they're classically trained rich person singing some fancy art music. Columbia and Victor have no idea which

is which basically, it's all just ethnic or foreign. Much of the material for these catalogs was produced at Columbia's New York studio inside the Woolworth Building on Broadway. It was at the time the tallest building in the United States. Musicians could get in the elevator and go up to the recording studio, I believe on the thirteen floor. It must have been very intense. The recording engineers had a system where they would show you a colored card or

a colored light to tell you when to begin. They would show you another colored card or another colored light to tell you when you had thirty seconds left to wrap it up for the end of the side, and then the color changes once again. And that's the end of the side. Because you can only fit about three minutes and thirty seconds tops onto a side of a disk, that's it. So you have to have pre rehearsed and timed out the piece. Now you know a lot of

these performers would play a piece for seven, eight twenty minutes. Yeah, a lot of these people who are playing dance songs. You know, this is party stuff. Or maybe there were extra verses. You know, maybe the song goes on for you know, six minutes, but you got three and a half. Do it or don't, and so you have to tie out your performance beforehand and show up at the recording studio ready to do it. Immigrant performers were generally given

one take and that was it. Mariko papagicas Smerneco was recorded in July in that building. The Papagica record is extraordinary because she took three takes to do it, very very unusual. I don't know how or why that happened, but it certainly paid off. When you hear that first note that she sings, that doesn't come from nowhere, That's a note that somebody worked on a Why the company let her try it over and over, we don't know. Because everything else she recorded that day she recorded in

one take. She did record the same piece seven months earlier for Victor Records a few blocks away. That record actually sold better, circulated more, and copies of that are are available a little bit, but they're not as good. Same performance, exact, same arrangement. Everybody plays exactly the same note at the same time, but it doesn't have the thing. It doesn't have the Fire that Columbia version that she did July, of which, to the best of my knowledge,

less than five copies exist now of that record. It did not sell. Mario Papagico was somebody who overtly attempted to cross over into kind of like a hybridized mainstream Americanized style, and she recorded a bunch of material not with a traditional Turkish or Greek style band, but with pop orchestra, including some stuff that mentions like having your hair bobbed or iron in your hair, you know, americanized things,

cars and electricity, stuff that was new for immigrants. She was actively attempting to appeal to an American eye, a sense among Greeks, a sense of being assimilated into American culture. One of the people that she was involved with was a record producer at Victor Records. He ran there Foreign an Ethnic series for a while. His name was Tetos Demitrioti's. He had a great ear new talent and stayed in the record business for decades and decades and decades. Demitriots

was a young guy from Constantinople. He was Greek and very cosmopolitan in his view of music, A real lover of music. I think he was himself a singer, not a great singer, but serviceable, perfectly fine. He was a nice looking guy. But his big hit record, which he re recorded several times and republished a sheet music and you know, really milked as much as he could. It was a song that really took the public imagination for decades,

called miser Loop, which means little Egyptian Girl. All that name he recorded at first, Well, it becomes a song that's played by klezmer bands in the forties and fifties, and it winds up being performed by singers of the classic American songbook with new lyrics in English Desert Chattels, Three Books, Purple sid and then you know, it winds up being covered by Dick Dale and the Dell Tones for one, and eventually used the theme song for the

movie Pulp Fiction. So Demitrioti's interest in americanizing Greek music winds up happening in this way that he never could

have predicted. Now it's been pointed out that Dick Dale's uncle was an OWD player, and that his surf guitar style of this you know, fluttering kind of right hand picking technique, it was most likely derived in some way from his uncle's food playing and that surf guitar, the ventures and all that kind of stuff comes partially from exposure to immigrants from the Near East, Lebanese and Armenian players, in particular, lots and lots of them in California. Fresno

was largely built by Armenians. So why can these records be so hard to find now? Well, in the first place, they weren't necessarily minted in vast quantities. A good selling ethnic or foreign record in the nineteen teams or twenties is selling three hundred to three thousand copies roughly. You know, three thousand is quite good. Three d is a bit disappointing. There are certainly examples on the books of records that

only sold twelve copies or thirty copies or something. But the records that were produced have a long shelf life due to their composition, of which shellac is not the main ingredient. They're made of about ten to fifteen percent shelack. What they're mostly made of, the records is about ground stone. Then there's added to that, you know, some carbon blacks, so they're uniformly black, so you've got a consistent looking product.

Some cotton fiber is binder, but they're basically stones. They will blast for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. If they're not worn out by being played, or if they're not abused, are neglected, they'll last a very very long time, much much longer than you or me or anybody who will ever remember us. The conditions that made these recordings so rare. That confluence of factors again gets

tangled in questions of American identity. Okay, Grandma and Grandpa came from the old Country, and they accumulated a little stack of this old country music that they would listen to sometimes when they're feeling nostalgic or parties or something. Mom and Dad grew up in this house and they heard those records sometimes, but it's not their music. They were Americans. They grew up with American music and tried to be more American, and they didn't really connect with

the music. Now, Grandma and Grandpa died and lady left behind these records, and the record stuck around in the attic or the basement, and then Mom and Dad are getting up there, and now we've got to find a thing to do with these records. So what do you do. You've seen antique road show. You know, there's such a thing as people who like this old stuff. They're antiques. They're antiques, right, Somebody wants these, So you go you find yourself a nerd. You go find yourself a record collector.

Not easy to do, but there he is. He shows up, He looks through your records and he goes, yeah, it's not really what I'm looking for. I don't collect foreign. It's an actual line from the movie Ghost World. I don't really collect That's what they all said for years. I don't collect foreign. Nobody did. What record collectors collected was stuff that had to do with the story of America, country, blues, jazz, gospel, and so that's what the seventy collectors were looking for.

But the immigrants stuff, the ethnic stuff. The record collector is standing there in your living room with your grandparents records in his hand, and he hands them back to you and he goes, sorry, it's nothing here. I can use really dollar apiece now, sorry, it's just I don't I don't think anybody wants these. So then what happens to them? Will you throw them away? They're junk? If that guy doesn't want them, nobody he wants them, right, maybe you try them on eBay. Not many people buying

them on eBay. You know, it's the hardly worth boxing and up for you know, a dollar or two a piece. It's this broader cultural sense of America, as American culture doesn't include all this stuff that happened in foreign languages or vernacular, foreign ideas. That has led to the scarcity of their records because there just hasn't been a broader conversation about the value of them. There hasn't been a a guess culturally that that they matter, so they get

thrown in the garbage. Rescuing a work before he gets thrown in the garbage is, of course, only the first step. These records come laden with questions, and even the most dogged diligent research sometimes leads to a dead end. Some of these people, I've been able to dig up biographical information. I've been able to get a sense of who they were and what they accomplished, and what their lives were like, where they were from, at least when they were born,

when they died or something. This is a guy, for instance, that I don't think we'll ever really know anything that much about he made a few dozen records for both Colombia and Victor in the nineteen teens, and then he just vanishes. No idea where he went. We don't know where he came from, and we probably never will. The name that he uses on the labels of the records is the reason we won't know. The name is Kim Animanas. Menas is just real common last name, and Kemeny is

just an honorific It just means very good violinist. So there's really kind of no way to look up a guy like that. This is his masterpiece. This is his best performance. They're all good. He never made a bad record, but this is the great one. Y nagging be yea yeah day yah yeah. This is a record from v that's a description of the destruction of the village of Aigan dam redidi j. Aigan was way out in eastern Turkey near the Review Frates, and Aigan was systemically destroyed.

A third of the population was killed and half of the homes were burned by the Ottoman government as part of the Hammadian massacres in direct retaliation for the political action of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. This song is a direct account remembered by our Armenian immigrants to the United States of that tragedy a day. Yeah, it's a super performance, one of the most wonderful vocal performances I've ever heard in my life. And the record sold like absolute hotcakes.

I mean, thousands and thousands of copies. Gid up. It's an incredibly easy record to get, and it's worth almost nothing. I think you probably get like a beautiful copy on eBay right now for like ten bucks. But it's a jewel. It's a real masterpiece and we'll never know who he was. Yet. Not every track that Canary has reissued qualifies as rare. For instance, one disc that's abundantly available paints a biting

portrayal of life in the US. One of the very first records in Turkish that I ever bought was a record called nt Him Get Him amry Kaya. I'm pronouncing that wrong. I pronounced everything wrong because I only speak English. I've owned maybe seven eight copies of this record over the years, like you find it all over the place. The first one I bought was fifty cents, and I don't think I've paid much more for one since then. It turns up all over the place it was made

in for Columbia. It's a twelve inch disc, meaning it was a dollar twenty five at the time, a much more expensive record, and must have sold tens of thousands, potentially a hundred thousand copies, probably to every Turkish speaking household in the United States at the end of the nineteen twenties. The guy who made it was a Greek guy from northwest present day Turkey. His name is Achilles Pulos. He was a good dude player. He was a party guy.

Every Polo story includes some amount of drinking and boozing. Poulos and his wife owned a little nightclub around forty one eighth Avenue, and during Prohibition they got shut down by the cops for selling booze. The cops shut down the place and throw Polos in the tombs for a couple of nights. He gets out, opens up another place exactly Cateacorner, and goes right back to doing what he

was doing. But it was a place where you could go in, you could get a coffee cup full of booze and listen to a guy play songs from home. Achilles puloss biggest hit was this song, let Him Get Him Americaya, which means why I came to America. It seems to be his own lyrics to a an older traditional song that he knew, and the song is about regretting the choice to have come to the United States so cruel? Why do you make us suffer? I wish I never came, never saw? This is part of what

he sings in it all. John bitch All, John oh Sy Achilles Pullos records prolifically songs in about five years, and then the depression hits nine and he just disappears, just gone. There's just no more Achilles Polos records. Just strange for somebody who sold so many records and seemed to be had been so popular. And so the story circulated that he had been ratted out to immigration services for having made this record, for having made something so

disrespectful to America. America was deporting a lot of people in the twenties for almost any reason. It wasn't hard to trump up something to make you look like a criminal and send you back on your way. The story is circulated for decades that that's what happened to Pulos. Well, as I began looking into Pulos a little bit more. It turns out, no, he didn't go back to Turkey. He went somewhere else. He went to Connecticut, h I went to work for a coffee roaster, and he's buried there.

He died there in the nineteen seventies. Apparently he had arthritis and it got hard to play, and I think the drinking thing didn't help. So we only get about five years of Achille Polos's life on record, unfortunately, including this like Monster, Monster Hit Here Get that's one of the most important commentaries on the immigrant life in America at the time. I think in many of these performances,

the lyrics course with anxiety and fear. In the nine twenties, that was in some part reflective of mounting changes in US immigration policy. For a very long time in the United States, there's simply were no laws restricting immigration. If you can make it, you're in. End of the nineteenth century is the Chinese Exclusion Act. United States specifically decides there's a group of people we don't like and we don't trust, and we don't think are part of us,

and we're not letting any more of them. In most of America was behind that idea opened a huge can of worms. In the U S government passed the Johnson Read Act, which established quotas based on nation of origin

in immigration. The quotas were basically set up so that America would stay percentage wise exactly the color of white that the nation had been fifty years earlier, the same percent tage of Germans, the same percentage of English, the same percentage of Irish, to maintain a particular racial profile

for the country. From onward, lots of Scandinavians were allowed, lots of Germans, lots of English, lots of French, fewer Italians, fewer Polls, very few Syrians, Greeks, Turks, no one from Africa, and no one from Asian period for four decades, that

remained the situation for immigrants in the United States. It's not that they couldn't have come, it's that we said, we don't want our country to look like that, and the result for people who had come from the Ottoman Empire was that their families couldn't come anymore, and it broke families up. Godsia I have bid us I bed us. This is a record made about twenty seven thereabouts called gukas, which means where do you come from a shot shot

why not. It was recorded for the Pharaohs Record Company by a guy named Nishan kill Jackian who was a land surveyor for the city of Medford. He didn't record very much, but he did make this one I think very important record because it is, as far as I know, the only Armenian record that directly protests something. And what it's directly protesting is the Johnson Read Act the problem

of Armanian families being separated by immigration cours. I got, I got a prisoner, but there is no singular experience verified by just how eclectic emigrat catalogs could be. There were songs of hardship, songs of protest, and nihilistic party songs. Another performer that I've been looking into specifically as a personality and as a biography is Edward Begoesian. Yet Vartoi Bogosian was like a good time guy, a fun guy, party guy, kind of a drunk uncle type. I guess

you could say. He was born nine hundred in Constantinople, arrives in the us UH and tours around as a comedian. He's a clown the stage show where he sings funny, almost dirty songs. Some of his songs are things about like gambling and like don't trust your husbands, and you know, stuff about people manipulating each other for immigration status, you know, all kinds of you know, fun cynical kind of stuff.

Starts recording for Pharaos Records in the twenties, go silent through the depression, and starts recording again in the early forties for a little independent company that was marketing records to Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Albanian, Ladino speaking immigrants. Remember this is almost twenty years to the Johnson read Act. These are people who barely remember whom. These are people for whom you know, the past is back. There are ways And this song was his biggest hit, who was massively popular.

Song called man then said I and the lyrics basically go, you know you can't trust anybody in this life. Don't believe what people tell you me. I like to eat, I like to drink booze, I like to have a good time. Keith is the word means stoned in Turkish, but in Armenian it basically just means like laid back, relaxed times kes And then comes the big single long chorus which means in English, it's fake. It's fake, it's fake,

it steake, everything is fake in Armenian. Buddy of mine, when I first told him that I was interested in this song, he goes like, you know, come on, He's like, look, if you're like me and you go to a lot of Armenian events, it's like having a gel. You know, it's a cliche, like I'm so used to hearing drunk uncle's playing the song. But for such a cliche, there are no copies of this record online. You can't go hear this record unless you have a seventy eight of it.

That's it. It hasn't circulated in seventy years almost, and it's a massive, great hit song of its time. Do you feel kind of like a yeah, a gate keeper holding these personal stories. I'm not keeping them. I'm trying to get rid of them as fast as I can. I have taken them on and have tried to learn them in as much detail and to be able to tell them as best I can. But I don't want to have to keep them. They belong to other people

more than they do to me. Please ease do something with him, because I won't be here all that long. And the stories and the ideas and the performers and the performances, those have got to stay for a while longer than me. Hopefully the last artist will play here is the first I heard from the Canary collection, and indeed my introduction to this sliver of history, this moment that time forgot. The voice of Zabel Pennosian haunts me.

It haunts Ian as it has haunted countless more. Isabel Pennosian recorded only about a dozen performances over the course of about a year in Zabel Pennosian was born in northeastern Anatolia immigrants, comes through France and then comes to the US, where she settles in Boston. She's classically trained,

performs with the short lived Boston an Opera Company. Winds up making this series of records for Colombia in New York in the teens, and then she tours around for some years in the United States raising money for the Near East Relief Campaign, the first massive philanthropic project in the United States, raised millions and millions and millions of dollars for people who were suffering in Turkey and Syria.

Then she winds up touring all over Europe for a couple of the decades really and is a huge star playing all these fancy opera houses. She comes back to the US basically becomes a quiet, private citizen. None of her kids have kids, so she has no direct descendants. There are still living nieces and nephews who never knew that their aunt was a musician at all. But she recorded one of the definitive Armenian songs of the first part of the twentieth century, a record that tour people's

hearts out and sold like crazy for decades. The song is called Grunk Means Cream. It's a melody that she actually remembers from childhood, and she seems to have basically composed and arranged this song herself. The reason it was such a huge hit in the US was that the lyrics are basically crane. Do you have any news from home? Please don't run back, There'll be enough time. I want to know what's happening back home with my people. That's

the basic gist of the lyrics. The conflicts between Armenians and the Turkish Ottoman government had escalated to a point where the Turkish government had decided to simply solve the problem, and they did so in this systemic way. The Ottoman government had rounded up a million, million and a half Armenians out of their villages and begun marching them southward into the Syrian desert, where they died of famine first exposure.

It was the first genocide of the twentieth century. It was the event for which the term genocide was invented. Armenians who were in the United States, therefore, we're in a situation where they were desperate for news about home. Not only had the government confiscated their homes, their land, their rugs, their money, whatever they left behind. Also, to their great horror, reports began coming in that everyone they ever knew was dead, and there was no home to

go back to anymore. There simply was nowhere left, that is whom, Nothing that they remembered could ever be repeated, and almost everybody you knew was gone. So drunk was the perfect distillation of that horror and sorrow and desperation of being stranded as an Armenian in the United States. Immediately after the genocide, Genocide is record comes out. Now This record was again a huge hit, sold thousands of copies.

When I first in countered it about I'd never heard of it or her, and there was nothing to find out. There was nobody to ask. The record had never been written about once by anybody in any book. There wasn't such a thing as Abell Pennosian in cultural memory. So I began looking and looking looking, and then a couple of buddies of mine got interested and joined in, and they wound up turning up a bunch of Armenian language newspapers and magazines and stuff from the old days that

did include some details. And so gradually we've gotten a full picture of Zabelle's life, and we're going to be able to tell her whole story of who she was and what she accomplished. It's really just because these records stick around and because they're made a stone. And it mattered immensely that this song continued to live. I couldn't

understand how it could have been forgotten for so long. Somehow, having this woman's voice as an American immigrant, as a refugee, I think it matters to America that she gets to be heard. I think it matters to music students that they should know that this song exists, might change how they think about themselves. Remembers the Bell's records were made and marketed as ethnic records. These were not marketed as read label classical records for fancy people, but they are.

She may have been, I think, seriously discouraged by the fact that she was ghetto wized as a as an immigrant, as an ethnic performer. Maybe that's one of the reasons she didn't record anymore in the US. We don't know working it out. The stories of these performers lives. The brief glimpses we've been afforded, like the songs themselves, have a timeless quality, but the lessons are perhaps more relevant

than ever. There are certainly forces in America right now that are attempting to limit the definition of American nous that includes American creativity, and they're using a skewed version of history and a skewed sense of American identity to do it. If all you know about America and the history of immigration to this country over the past hundred years is this tiny little bit of images and ideas that you get in a kind of public education, you'll

be easily swayed. So I think it's extremely important, just generally for Americans to look honestly and clearly at who we are and what we've done. The fact of the matter is it's it's kind of great. It's a lot of fun. And I don't know that much about history. I'm not the best read person in the world. What I do know is that music is great. Music is always really, really, really good. And whenever anybody's playing music, they're not doing anything wrong, They're only doing something right.

To look at American music and what American musicians have accomplished is also always good and always a pleasure. It's the reverse of the kind of oppression and the kind of fear and anger that we see bubbling around in the in the culture. Records are great. I really like old records along, Yeah me too. Ephemeral is written and assembled by me and produced by any Reese, Matt Frederick,

and Tristan McNeil, with technical assistance from Sherry Larson. Our hats off to Ian Nagaski for doing extraordinary work and for being so generous with his time. This conversation was inspired by the compilation to What Strange Place the Music of the Ottoman American Diaspora. You can find it all these songs and more at Canary Dash Records, Dot band camp dot com and a little something about us at ephemeral dot Shows in the world, Lad and Medium podcast

and I I Media our podcast. Are you using your favorite chist