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

Assad Dakroub When immigrants to the United States began to arrive from Greater Syria in the 1880s, their numbers were relatively small, but they were noticeable. As these numbers increased, and Ottoman and former Ottoman emigrants left in earnest, those who arrived were largely poor, on the verge of becoming poor, and primarily Christian (Orthodox, Melkite, and Maronite). Arab Muslim immigrants to the United States represented only ten to twenty percent of new arrivals from the Levant, if that. Consequently, the majority of those musicians who recorded music in the 1920s and have been featured on the Midwest Mahjar identified as Christian, while a couple identified as Druze (Amer Kadaj) or Muslim (Prince Mohiuddin). Assad Dakroub was a minority among minorities in the first wave of Arab immigration to the US – he was a musician or singer, Muslim, and educated. Some of the places he settled give us a peek into smaller Syrian/Lebanese Muslim communities bu...

Fedora “Fadwa” Kurban Fedora "Fadwa" Kurban, 4 October 1935, Madison Eagle . Courtesy of newspapers.com Maloof Records has fascinated 78 rpm record collectors for decades. Ethnomusicologist Richard K. Spottswood painstakingly documented much of what had been recorded on Alexander Maloof’s label and we know that some of the last recordings on the Maloof Record De Luxe Orientale phonograph label are credited to Mme. Fadwa Kurban. Like other musicians who emigrated from or are descendants of those who left Greater Syria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we know very little about Fadwa Kurban, her connections to Alexander Maloof,  or her music - until now. Fedora “Fadwa” Kurban was one of seven children born to Navum Kurban and Saada Kurban on 11 May 1898 in either the coastal city of Acre, Palestine (now Israel) or Aqraba, Syria. She started singing when she turned five but her father, Navum, a professor at the Syrian Protes...