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

  The Sweet Sounds and Compositions of Assyrian American Musician Joseph Sugar Joseph R. Sugar, 1946. Union High School yearbook. Courtesy of Ancestry.com Near Eastern American musicians have long come from and identified with a vast array of linguist ethnic groups (Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Turks, and Assyrians), nationalities, and religious faiths (Christians, Muslims, and Jews) with shared but equally varied facets of expressive cultures. Many first wave immigrants and first-generation musicians from the Near East and North Africa like Alexander Maloof , Mohamed Zaineldeen , Moses Cohen , and others who shared this assortment of ethnic identities collaborated, helped one another, and performed together in the 1910s and 1920s. As some of these pioneering musicians began to pass on in the 1940s and 1950s, those who remained, in addition to younger, and sometimes second-wave immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, turned toward recording on new microgroove vinyl records. S...