May 20, 2019 • 59 mins
What makes American music American? If the history book is written, what chapters are missing? Featuring music researcher Ian Nagoski of Canary Records. Learn more at www.ephemeral.show
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
A federal as a protection of my heart radio. The
history of American music in twelve seconds, things that related
directly to what we created as Americans, that led up
to our greatest musical contributions to the world. Old jazz,
(00:22):
old blues, old gospel, old country, that's kind of America.
That's one narrative, but the full story, like America itself,
it's much more complicated. And Ian Nagaski has something he'd
like to add. My name is Ian Nagaski. I'm a
music researcher and record producer near Baltimore, Maryland. A little
(00:43):
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
(01:05):
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
(01:25):
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?
(01:45):
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.
(02:08):
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
(02:31):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:13):
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.
(03:35):
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
(03:55):
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
(04:17):
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
(04:43):
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
(05:04):
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.
(05:27):
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,
(05:49):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:36):
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
(07:01):
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.
(07:23):
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
(07:44):
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
(08:09):
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.
(08:32):
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,
(08:54):
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
(09:15):
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
(09:35):
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
(09:59):
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,
(10:20):
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
(10:43):
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
(11:11):
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
(11:36):
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
(12:00):
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,
(12:23):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:05):
a Lepo named dim Caricom. By the end of his
(13:39):
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,
(14:05):
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
(14:27):
way he did when he first starts recording fourteen for Columbia.
Before coming to America, Nain Caracand may have studied with
(14:49):
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
(15:11):
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
(15:32):
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
(16:00):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:46):
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.
(17:06):
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
(17:28):
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
(17:49):
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
(18:10):
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
(18:39):
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
(19:46):
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
(20:06):
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,
(20:27):
less than five copies exist now of that record. It
did not sell. Mario Papagico was somebody who overtly attempted
(21:27):
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,
(21:50):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:34):
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,
(22:55):
called miser Loop, which means little Egyptian Girl. All that
name he recorded at first, Well, it becomes a song
(23:19):
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
(23:41):
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
(24:02):
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
(24:25):
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
(24:47):
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
(25:08):
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
(25:29):
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
(25:56):
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.
(26:18):
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.
(26:43):
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
(27:05):
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,
(27:30):
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
(27:53):
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.
(28:24):
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
(28:46):
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.
(29:09):
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,
(29:31):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:21):
best performance. They're all good. He never made a bad record,
but this is the great one. Y nagging be yea
(30:43):
yeah day yah yeah. This is a record from v
that's a description of the destruction of the village of
(31:05):
Aigan dam redidi j. Aigan was way out in eastern
(31:33):
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
(31:53):
direct account remembered by our Armenian immigrants to the United
States of that tragedy a day. Yeah, it's a super performance,
(32:13):
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
(32:34):
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.
(33:01):
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
(33:22):
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
(33:42):
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.
(34:08):
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
(34:30):
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
(34:50):
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
(35:22):
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
(35:51):
Sy Achilles Pullos records prolifically songs in about five years,
and then the depression hits nine and he just disappears,
(36:14):
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
(36:35):
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.
(36:57):
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
(37:20):
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
(37:42):
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
(38:04):
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
(38:25):
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
(38:46):
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
(39:07):
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,
(39:28):
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
(39:53):
broke families up. Godsia I have bid us I bed us.
(40:16):
This is a record made about twenty seven thereabouts called gukas,
which means where do you come from a shot shot
(40:42):
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
(41:06):
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
(41:39):
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
(42:00):
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
(42:22):
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
(42:45):
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
(43:05):
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,
(43:47):
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
(44:17):
chorus which means in English, it's fake. It's fake, it's fake,
it steake, everything is fake in Armenian. Buddy of mine,
(44:44):
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
(45:06):
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
(45:33):
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
(45:55):
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
(46:18):
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
(46:41):
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
(47:02):
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.
(47:26):
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
(47:51):
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
(48:17):
is called Grunk Means Cream. It's a melody that she
(49:07):
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
(49:30):
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,
(49:51):
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.
(50:13):
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,
(50:36):
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
(51:00):
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
(51:23):
of being stranded as an Armenian in the United States.
Immediately after the genocide, Genocide is record comes out. Now
(52:55):
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
(53:17):
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
(53:38):
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,
(54:04):
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
(54:25):
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
(54:46):
she didn't record anymore in the US. We don't know
working it out. The stories of these performers lives. The
(55:35):
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
(55:55):
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
(56:18):
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
(56:42):
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
(57:02):
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
(57:57):
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
(58:20):
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
(58:51):
and I I Media our podcast. Are you using your
favorite chist
A federal as a protection of my heart radio. The
history of American music in twelve seconds, things that related
directly to what we created as Americans, that led up
to our greatest musical contributions to the world. Old jazz,
(00:22):
old blues, old gospel, old country, that's kind of America.
That's one narrative, but the full story, like America itself,
it's much more complicated. And Ian Nagaski has something he'd
like to add. My name is Ian Nagaski. I'm a
music researcher and record producer near Baltimore, Maryland. A little
(00:43):
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
(01:05):
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
(01:25):
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?
(01:45):
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.
(02:08):
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
(02:31):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:13):
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.
(03:35):
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
(03:55):
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
(04:17):
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
(04:43):
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
(05:04):
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.
(05:27):
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,
(05:49):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:36):
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
(07:01):
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.
(07:23):
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
(07:44):
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
(08:09):
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.
(08:32):
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,
(08:54):
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
(09:15):
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
(09:35):
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
(09:59):
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,
(10:20):
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
(10:43):
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
(11:11):
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
(11:36):
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
(12:00):
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,
(12:23):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:05):
a Lepo named dim Caricom. By the end of his
(13:39):
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,
(14:05):
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
(14:27):
way he did when he first starts recording fourteen for Columbia.
Before coming to America, Nain Caracand may have studied with
(14:49):
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
(15:11):
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
(15:32):
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
(16:00):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:46):
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.
(17:06):
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
(17:28):
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
(17:49):
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
(18:10):
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
(18:39):
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
(19:46):
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
(20:06):
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,
(20:27):
less than five copies exist now of that record. It
did not sell. Mario Papagico was somebody who overtly attempted
(21:27):
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,
(21:50):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:34):
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,
(22:55):
called miser Loop, which means little Egyptian Girl. All that
name he recorded at first, Well, it becomes a song
(23:19):
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
(23:41):
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
(24:02):
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
(24:25):
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
(24:47):
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
(25:08):
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
(25:29):
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
(25:56):
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.
(26:18):
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.
(26:43):
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
(27:05):
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,
(27:30):
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
(27:53):
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.
(28:24):
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
(28:46):
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.
(29:09):
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,
(29:31):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:21):
best performance. They're all good. He never made a bad record,
but this is the great one. Y nagging be yea
(30:43):
yeah day yah yeah. This is a record from v
that's a description of the destruction of the village of
(31:05):
Aigan dam redidi j. Aigan was way out in eastern
(31:33):
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
(31:53):
direct account remembered by our Armenian immigrants to the United
States of that tragedy a day. Yeah, it's a super performance,
(32:13):
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
(32:34):
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.
(33:01):
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
(33:22):
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
(33:42):
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.
(34:08):
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
(34:30):
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
(34:50):
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
(35:22):
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
(35:51):
Sy Achilles Pullos records prolifically songs in about five years,
and then the depression hits nine and he just disappears,
(36:14):
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
(36:35):
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.
(36:57):
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
(37:20):
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
(37:42):
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
(38:04):
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
(38:25):
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
(38:46):
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
(39:07):
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,
(39:28):
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
(39:53):
broke families up. Godsia I have bid us I bed us.
(40:16):
This is a record made about twenty seven thereabouts called gukas,
which means where do you come from a shot shot
(40:42):
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
(41:06):
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
(41:39):
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
(42:00):
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
(42:22):
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
(42:45):
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
(43:05):
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,
(43:47):
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
(44:17):
chorus which means in English, it's fake. It's fake, it's fake,
it steake, everything is fake in Armenian. Buddy of mine,
(44:44):
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
(45:06):
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
(45:33):
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
(45:55):
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
(46:18):
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
(46:41):
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
(47:02):
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.
(47:26):
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
(47:51):
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
(48:17):
is called Grunk Means Cream. It's a melody that she
(49:07):
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
(49:30):
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,
(49:51):
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.
(50:13):
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,
(50:36):
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
(51:00):
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
(51:23):
of being stranded as an Armenian in the United States.
Immediately after the genocide, Genocide is record comes out. Now
(52:55):
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
(53:17):
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
(53:38):
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,
(54:04):
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
(54:25):
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
(54:46):
she didn't record anymore in the US. We don't know
working it out. The stories of these performers lives. The
(55:35):
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
(55:55):
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
(56:18):
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
(56:42):
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
(57:02):
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
(57:57):
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
(58:20):
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
(58:51):
and I I Media our podcast. Are you using your
favorite chist
Ephemeral News
Host
Alex Williams
Show Links
AboutPopular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com