The HW Syrian Record Label: Hanna Wackeen, Dave Bonnesar, and the Connections Between La Crosse and Los Angeles
The HW Syrian Record Label: Hanna Wackeen, Dave Bonnesar, and the Connections Between Arabic Music in La Crosse and Los Angeles
On April 24, 2022, we purchased a 78-rpm record on a label we had never seen before. A metallic-gold label, with black font printed in both Arabic and English puzzled us as to whether this “HW Syrian Record” was a disc released with an intended Mahjari or Mashriqi audience in mind. We were equally bewildered by the idea that we purchased this disc from a mobile DJ and record collector who lives in the most northern reaches of the State of Wisconsin – all the way up in Door County. After making the purchase, we inquired as to how such as rare gem had found its way to Door County? Dave replied, “I used to live in Los Angeles.” His wife, it turns out, was raised in Wisconsin and the couple had relocated here to be closer to her family. After doing some digging, it all made sense. A guy who used to live in Los Angeles and collects records, located a 78-rpm disc recorded by a Syrian immigrant to the United States who settled in Los Angeles and years later that disc found its way into his hands. After the 78 rpm record arrived at Midwest Mahjar in La Crosse, Wisconsin, we listened, started to dig into the record's history - then things got weirdly serendipitous. We had never heard of Hanna Wackeen before seeing this label, so we got to work and here's what we found.
Hanna G. Wackeen or John George Wackeen was born in Douma, Greater Syria (now Lebanon) 3 October 1898. Douma, located approximately fifty miles east of Beirut, is also the city where A.J. Macksoud and Maloof Phonograph Records’ star Salim Doumani had been born the year before and singer Braheen Abdo Urban would be born four years later. In July 1913, Hanna Wackeen immigrated to the United States via the Port of Providence, Rhode Island. Three years previously, Rhode Island maintained a Syrian population of 1,092 according to Najeeb Abdou, with approximately 600 residing in Providence. The amount of time the family stayed in Rhode Island remains unclear, but it was not very long. Some of Hanna’s relatives, including his brother Toufic (Taft) and his family, had already moved to Los Angeles by 1916; Hanna moved west by June, 1917. Hanna first took up employment as a barber. His clientele consisted of Syrians and non-Syrians. He variously moved from 110 E. 10th Street in Los Angeles to 3966 Hammel Street and then basically around the corner to 3967 Dozier Avenue.
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| John G. Wackeen's World War I draft card. Courtesy of Ancestry.com |
Syrians who moved to Los Angeles experienced life quite differently from those who settled in Manhattan's Little Syria. Where those coming to New York City moved into neighborhoods occupied and once occupied by Irish and German immigrants, those who chose Los Angeles as their final destinations settled amongst both Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans whose predecessors were crossed by the border with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo back in 1848. Beginning in 1924 with his application for intent to naturalize, and in the same year Congress passed its infamously restrictive Immigration Act, Hanna Wackeen not only sought to become a United States citizen, but began the process to change his legal name from Hanna Wakim to John George Wackeen. Interestingly, he variably used Hanna Wakim, Hanna Wackeen, and John George Wackeen during the course of his lifetime. This can make tracking Wackeen over the years all the more complicated.
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| John George Wackeen offically becomes a naturalized US citizen and registers his name change. Courtesy of Ancestry.com |
Like a number of Arab American musicians during the 1920s and 1930s, Hanna Wackeen worked as a full-time grocer, but part-time musician. Nascent radio station KFI-Los Angeles began airing an Arab music program by 1928 featuring Dave Bonnesar on oud or violin and Hanna Wackeen on ney or singing tenor. Bonnesar and Wackeen performed on radio and occasionally toured together throughout parts of California. For instance, on 28 March 1935, Syrian Americans and Syrian immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area gathered at the International Order of Odd Fellows Hall at Eleventh Street and Franklin in downtown Oakland to attend a concert featuring John Wackeen and Dave Bonnesar. On this particular night, Bonnesar played violin and Wackeen played nay and/or sang. Perhaps most interestingly, the Oakland Tribune referred to Wackeen as the “Caruso of Syria.” Within a year, Bonnesar sat in as violin accompaniment for the movie, “The Garden of Allah,” a film adapted from the 1904 novel by British author Robert Hichens, starring Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer and produced by David Selznick. It’s an early Technicolor film about a love affair between a monk who defects from a monastery and formerly cloistered postulant in an order of nuns.
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| Dave Bonnesar and John Wackeen perform in Oakland, California, Oakland Tribune, 26 March 1935. Courtesy of Newspapers.com |
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| John Wackeen and Dave Bonnesar perform at Flag Day Celebration, Hollywood Citizen News, 12 June 1942. Courtesy of Newspapers.com |
Hanna Wackeen’s frequent collaborator, Dave Bonnesar, has his own interestingly complex story. Dave Michael Bonnesar was born to Mary Tobey (b.1869-d.1910) and Michael Bonnesar (b. 1868- d. 1936) on 5 September 1902 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Michael and Mary wed in 1886, immigrated to the United States from Greater Syria and came to the upper Midwest. They lived in Duluth, Saint Paul, and New London, Wisconsin. Although Wisconsin had growing populations of Arabic-speaking immigrants in Green Bay, Fond du Lac, and Milwaukee, when Mary died, Michael moved his children to La Crosse, Wisconsin after marrying Fredda Sady (b. 1884-d.1935) in 1911. Over 300 people of Arab descent lived in La Crosse by 1910. Fredda Sady's younger brother was Rev. Elias Sady, the first full-time priest at La Crosse's Saint Elias Orthodox Church. In La Crosse, the Bonnesar’s lived at 509 Mill Street (now Copeland Avenue), Dave worked at Naif Abraham & George Abdo's pool room and drink parlor and as a helper in a roundhouse that served the five railroad companies that passed through the city and his dad labored as a warehouse worker for the P. Lorillard Tobacco Company.
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| Saint Elias Antiochian Orthodox Church in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Fr. Elias Sady served as its first full-time priest and musician Dave Bonnesar attended here during his years living in La Crosse. Photo courtesy of Richard M. Breaux. |
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| The 1922 La Crosse, Wisconsin City Directory shows Dave Bonnesar worked as a clerk at Abraham & Abdo's pool room and drink parlor. He lived with his father and step-mother Michael & Freda (Sady) Bonnesar. Courtesy of Ancestry.com |
Around 1923 or 1924, during an exodus of Syrian American residents from La Crosse, precipitated in part by slow local economic and the rise of the anti-non-white and anti-non-Protestant Ku Klux Klan, the Bonnesars left La Crosse and followed a number of families including founding Saint Elias Antiochian Orthodox Church priest Fr. Elias Sady to Los Angeles. Fr. Sady became the founding priest at Saint George Syrian Orthodox Church and in directly played a role with the creation of Saint Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in Los Angeles, although he remained with his parish. It remains a mystery how Bonnesar connected with the newly-established KFI radio, but he and John Wackeen were grocery store workers who found a common interest, started playing music together and played for KFI’s program. Fredda’s death, just as Dave and John began to play concerts and haflat, meant that Dave had to find other work. The duo played haflat and mahrajan across metropolitan Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Syrian Americans held one of the earliest documented mahrajan in Los Angeles in 1933. This started an annual event including the 1935 Riverside Mahrajan, arranged by Tom Bonnesar, where A.J. Macksoud recording artist Andrew MeKanna joined Dave Bonnesar and John Wackeen. Bonnesar remained a store merchant and secured occasional gigs in Hollywood film orchestras that needed violinists until his was unable to work. Bonnesar played in the orchestra and had minor extra roles in Road to Morocco (1942) starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour and Anthony Quinn and Desert Song (1943) starring Dennis Morgan, Irene Manning, Faye Emerson, and Gene Lockhart. As a some-times movie extra, Dave Bonnesar, of course, was a card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild. John Wackeen and Bonnesar performed as a part of a line up with other bands for the City’s Flag Day Program honoring Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Dave Bonnesar married Sophie Wackeen (b. 1921- d. 2012), herself an immigrant from Douma and Hanna Wackeen's niece, 19 August 1944 and the couple had two children a few years later.
Pacific coast haflat and mahrajan, particularly those in and around Los Angeles and San Diego, took on their own form both similar to and different to those on the east coast and in the Midwest. According to historian Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, in her book Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California (2019), mahrajan in Los Angeles "were spaces where participants renewed their Syrianess and its particularized iterations, and they served as a framework for organizing Arabic-, Spanish-, and English-speaking into a Pacific place." Moreover, Gualiteri maintains "because of their proximity to Hollywood and the entertainment industry, many of these artists hoped to influence representations of Middle Eastern culture, but the shifting tide of anti-Arab sentiment made this a difficult task."
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| World War II draft card for Dave Bonnesar. Courtesy of Ancestry.com |
When John Wackeen, under the name Hanna Wackeen, recorded his one and only single “Wa Lahza Mennak” on his custom “HW Syrian Record” label, Dave Bonnesar added violin accompaniment. The title loosely translates as “I Suffer When I am Away from You.” Although the quality of our copy of this record, and thus the sound quality, suffers some, we get a sense of what Wackeen and Bonnesar may have become if their recording careers had taken off.
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| https://youtu.be/d1Yw_-3IJIQ |
By 1940, John G. Wackeen listed himself as a musician on the U.S. Census, but he continued to list himself as a grocer on his California Voter Registration. Music would never served as the primary source of income for Wackeen or Bonnesar.
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John G. Wackeen's World War II draft card. Courtesy of Ancestry.com. The 1957 opening of Louis Shelby's The Fez Supper Club in Los Angeles transformed the Arab American music scene and ushered in the West Coast's nightclub era. Situated in Hollywood on Sunset and Vermont, the work of Roxxanne Shelaby points out that the two-story club had a first floor designated for more non-Arab guests and customers and a second floor dedicated to and geared towards a Middle Eastern crowd including LA's Arab, Armenian, and Iranian communities. We now know neither Dave Bonnesar nor John Wackeen ever performed at The Fez, but California and the West Coast had its own Middle Eastern musical stars - Najeeb Khouri, Kazzem Rasazan, Chick Kahla, Adel Sirhan, and Maroun Saba. Musicians like Toufic Barham and television-star Danny Thomas were also known to visit The Fez. Subsequently, Maroun Saba would record the only known LP created at The Fez "Live From the Fez" (1972) as he had taken on part ownership of the club. For more about The Fez, its music and especially its dancers, we recommend Roxxanne Shelaby's The Fez Documentary. Roxxanne Shelaby's work on The Fez Supper Club complicates our idea of what Anne Rasmussen calls the nightclub era and representation of Arabs in US Hollywood film. Perhaps differences exist from region to region, but Louis Shelaby's supper club had both an area for the general public, "The Magic Carpet Room," that entertained the ideals connected to Middle East fantasy, orientalism, and auto-orientalism, but it also had "Sinbad's Room," which by most descriptions seem to be more of a hangout served more complex cultural purposes for customers of Arab ancestry. Moreover portions of the film Hell Squad (1986) critiqued by the late film scholar and critic, Jack Sheheen in his book and film, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001, 2006), were filmed at The Fez before it shutdown. Shelaby's work also explores the importance of bellydance as not just an art form, but as space that nurtured young women, both Arab and non-Arab, to study during dance breaks and eventually enter into law, medicine, teaching, and other professions. Feiruz Aram, Aisha Ali, Antoinette Awayshak, and a host of others danced there and Toni Hanna, Toufic Barham, Saadoun Al-Bayati, and Maroun Saba (who eventually owned the club) sang there. |
Although some people believe Maroun Saba's LP "Live from the Fez," became the first Arab American record produced or recorded on the West Coast, Midwest Mahjar readers will recall that Braheen Abdo Urban or Edward Abdo released Arabic music on Tri-Art Productions in the 1930s from San Francisco and Hollywood. Pioneering Arab American singer and oudist Constantine Souss also released a personal label pressed by Hollywood Music City Records in the 1940s. Both singers performed on Alexander Maloof's Maloof Phonograph Records located in Manhattan's Little Syria in the 1920s. Of course, we now know that Hanna Wackeen and Dave Bonnesar released their 78-rpm disc in Los Angeles as well.
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| Hanna Wackeen (right) and Deeb Abi Nassar (left) 1930. Arab American Almanac. 5th edition. (News Circle Publishing House, Glendale, CA: 2003). |
The 1960s brought personal heartache for the Bonnesars, and by decade's end, a national tragedy brought negative attention, harassment, and FBI surveillance of Arab Americans in Los Angeles. Sadly, Dave Bonnesar died unexpectedly on 6 January 1963. His last address was 276 Twickenham Avenue. Bonnesar's children, David and Donna, were devastated. Bonnesar's now-late son, David, on ocassion, played derbeke at the Armenian-owned Seventh Veil or at The Fez whenever either needed a backup drum player. David Bonnesar also made the only non-commercial recording of music at The Fez. His particular recording captures a night Toufic Barham performed. The fact that the Sirhan family lived in Los Angeles, Adel Sirhan sometimes played at The Fez and on the southern California mahrajan circuit became of great concern when oudist Adel Sirhan's brother, Sirhan B. Sirhan shot former US Attorney General and then-US Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. FBI and police attention turned to Arab Americans in Los Angeles, and even musicians and dancers at The Fez and other Middle Eastern supper clubs found themselves targeted, followed, interrogated, and harassed. Some in the larger population of non-Arabs in Los Angeles also directed their scorn towards Arab Americans in the metropolitan area. Although The Fez operated in 1982, as our post on Mustafa D. Siam and Arab Tunes records demonstrates, the era between 1968 and 1990 gave way to period of increased anti-Arab sentiment and mistreatment. In response, Arab American civil and political rights organizations emerged in in Los Angeles and across the United States.
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| Dave Bonnesar, Sophie Wackeen, and John Wackeen. Courtesy of Donna M. |
John G. Wackeen's generation of musicians slowly aged out of publicly performing on a regular basis. Although they continued to play at smaller gatherings or private events for friends and family, there were limited opportunities for commercial recordings or appearances at haflat or mahrajan. Former A.J. Macksoud record's star Andrew Mekanna married one of Sophie (Wackeen) Bonnesar Richardson's relatives and he, too, stopped playing in more public gatherings. The larger mahrajan circuit, that once served as Arab America's cultural life line, stopped attracting their previous record-breaking crowds, although many of the older musicians played when they could. Times were changing, but musicians living in communities with larger concentrations of Arab American residents like Detroit-Dearborn, Brooklyn, upstate New York, and Los Angeles- faired better than those in smaller communities.
David Bonnesar (Dave Bonnesar's son) went on to establish his own company- BONN Corporation - where he developed military-grade tactical software for the now-retired F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber. The company no longer exists. David remained an avid lover of music until his passing in 2021.
John G. (Hanna) Wackeen lived to be 83 years old. He died 25 April 1982. Perhaps not surprisingly, Saint Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral in Los Angeles held his funeral services. This cathedral, you will recall, that was born from Saint George Syrian Orthodox Church, the place once shepherded by Fr. Elias Sady, the priest who relocated to Los Angeles after leaving Minneapolis and La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Special thanks to Donna M. and Paul M.
Richard M. Breaux
© Midwest Mahjar
Thank you for your hard work on this priceless research. Especially how you connect the dots!
ReplyDeleteThis is wonderful! So awesome to learn more! I’m related to David Bonnesar.
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