Midwest Mahjar: The Recorded Sounds of the Arabic-Speaking Diaspora in the United States at 78 RPM

  Ronnie Kirby: Boston Metro’s Go to Derbake Player Ronnie Kirby. From the back cover of  Anton Abdelahad's  Middle East Fantasy  LP. Courtesy of Richard Breaux collection.   At Midwest Mahjar we have been blogging about Arab American music for almost five years and we have featured very few percussionists, especially, derbake, doumbek, or drum players. The most well-known drummers to come to mind were Mike Hamway and Eddie Kochak . Anne K. Rassmussen’s work reveals that mahrajan and hafla organizers paid drummers or derbake players least of all. Yet the rhythmic, pulsating, thump of the derbake became a mainstay in the post-acoustic, electrical recording era Arab American music. During the early years of the mahrajan and hafla circuit, members of a traveling singer’s ensemble might come from a local community; however, over the years singers like Hanan and Tony Abdelahad demanded their own ensembles and accompanists travel along with them on the mahrajan cir...

  Joe Catton: A Kanun and Oud Player Links Two Worlds –  The Arabic-language Hafla Scene and Sephardic Jewish life in Brooklyn Joseph Catton, 1958.   A few of our most recent blog posts have explored the lives of Arabic and Hebrew-speaking Jewish immigrants who left Aleppo, Damascus, and/or Alexandria and immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. We have included Moses Cohen , Mayer Murad , and Nessim Murad among those musicians we have written profiles for, and Hakki Obadia and Shehadi Ashear as musicians we’ve yet to write about in any biographical detail. Arabic-speaking Jews in Brooklyn lived as a minority within a minority. The vast majority of Syrians immigrants to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century identified as Christian - Orthodox, Melkite, or Maronite. Some were even Presbyterian. Small numbers identified as Muslims and still others were Jews. Depending on the sources one consults, Syrian Jewish immigrants began c...