Louise Yazbeck: An Arab American Composer and Music Teacher Before Her Time

Miss Louise Yazbeck, The Shreveport Journal, 7 September 1932. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

Composers and musicians we’ve highlighted at Midwest Mahjar over the years include Alexander Maloof, Anis Fuleihan, Leon S. Nahmee, and Mohamed el Bakkar. All of these composers recorded their own compositions on phonograph record or had others record renditions of their compositions, Louise Yazbeck emerged as an exception on several fronts. 

 

Louise Margaret Yazbeck was born one of four children to Yousef/Joseph and Nejeeba Maroun Yazbeck in Shreveport, Louisiana, on 13 August 1907. Dr. Najib Abdou recorded 6,000 Syrian in Louisiana that year, although we don’t have an estimate for Shreveport. While some sources give Yazbeck’s birth year as 1910, she appears in her parents’ household in 1910 as a three-year-old. Joseph Yazbeck immigrated to the United States from Aamchit, Greater Syria (now Lebanon) in 1901 on board the S.S. Patricia two years after he married Nejeeba. Together the couple had Tony, Renet, Rosalie, and Louise. Tony and Renet attended Saint Johns and Louise and Rosalie attended Saint Mary’s Covenant where they both actively participated in school activities and performances. According to one source, Joseph lived in Rochester, New York, before settling in Shreveport, Louisiana. As early as June 16, 1914, Louise performed a song and drill called the “Flowery Garlands” and Rosalie appeared in a dramatic play “The White Dove of Oneida.” Two years later Louise took part in the “Awakening of the Fairies” and in 1917, she joined classmates in a production of “Little Grandmas in Grandma Land.”

 

Tragedy struck the Yazbeck family in 1919, when Renet Yazbeck, 18, mysteriously drowned at the Victory Natatorium Saltwater Swimming Pool. Local city officials had the Victory Natatorium constructed as a memorial to those who perished In World War I. Whether pushed in the deep end or in over his head, lifeguards discovered and recovered Renet Yazbeck’s body in 10 feet of water. Speculation concerning ability to swim and swim well filled news reports and difficulty notifying the family meant delays in funeral services.

The Shreveport Journal, 28 July 1918. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

The Yazbecks were neighbors with one Arab America’s most prominent intellectual minds and cultural producers – Afifa Karam. Born in the same city as Louise Yazbeck’s parents, Aamchit, in 1883, Karam and her husband immigrated to the United States and moved to Shreveport four years before the Yazbecks. Afifa Karam had already written for Naoum Mokarzel’s Al-Hoda by the time of Louise’s birth; and according to Karam’s biographer, Elizabeth C. Saylor, Karam had already written three novels in Arabic- Badi ‘a and Fu’ad (1906), Fatima the Bedouin (1908), and The Girl from Amshit (1911). In the next two years, Karam established and published two periodicals, The New World: A Ladies Monthly Magazine and Syrian Woman. Not surprisingly, Karam passionately advocated for women’s education. Afifa Karam died a celebrated and globally recognized literary and intellectual giant in 1924, the same year Yazbeck graduates from Saint Vincent and one year after Louise Yazbeck gave her first graduation recital.

Obituary of Afifa Karam, The Shreveport Journal, 29 July 1924. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

 

By 1925, Louise Yazbeck transitioned from student and pupil to music teacher. Yazbeck studied and trained at Saint Vincent’s after years at Saint Mary’s. She graduated from Saint Vincent in 1924, one of twelve in her academic class, and attended Centenary Convent under a professor Mendenhall. On September 24, 1925, she opened her own music studio in her parent’s home at 1025 Louisiana Avenue in Shreveport. Piano, music theory, and harmony centered her instructional curriculum. Locally, Yazbeck’s reputation as a pianist has been boosted by her appearance on KWKH radio making her a community favorite. This and local recitals, no doubt, helped attract students to her studio.

 

Advertisement. The Shreveport Journal 4 January 1926. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

Recitals, concerts, masses, and instruction filled Yazbeck’s schedule over the next few years. Her popularity reached national levels when at an eastern rite mass in November, 1925 she accompanied Columbia and Maloof Phonograph Records singer and composer Rev. George Aziz. Crowds packed Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Shreveport to capacity. When both non-Syrians and Syrians hosted classical musical programs in Shreveport, Louise Yazbeck performed in local schools, churches, social halls, and homes, much to the delight of local music lovers. The May 6^th dedication of Shreveport’s new Court of Castille of the Catholic Daughters of America contained a musical program that featured Yazbeck, Irene Stevens, and four additional musicians. Shen the Shreveport Elks’ Band held their concert on 7 May 1926, in the city hall auditorium, Yazbeck accompanied the Four-Square Quartet. Three days previously, Yazbeck also backed local soprano Mrs. Earl Bellows for a concert at a luncheon that helped raise funds for girls who were part of the YWCA to attend an annual conference at the YWCA Camp in Estes Park, Colorado. Of course, local musicians and music teachers elected Louise Yazbeck chairperson of the annual National Music Week celebration from 1926 to 1928. She also became a regular member of Shreveport’s Women’s Department Club.

The Shreveport Journal 19 June 1926. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

Radio and newspaper emerged as the medium Yazbeck used to showcase her musical talents on piano and oud while also publicizing the studio and celebrating her pupils’ accomplishments and recitals. On 3 August 1925, Louise Yazback played a solo piano concert on KWKH Shreveport broadcast from the Hotel Youree. Her instrument in this instance was a Sohmer Grand piano. Much to the public’s surprise, around 28 September 1925, Louis Darby, tenor, Fernand Braud, and Louise Yazbeck on harp and piano, once again appeared on local KWKH. Not all radio show featuring Yazbeck aired on the local KWHK. Reports suggest she had previously held one radio concert on WGAQ. A spring concert during Music Week on 2 May 1926, featured Louise Yazbeck and her students on KWHK. Radio station KSBA highlighted Yazbeck and her students in an 8 December 1926 concert. Hot Spring, Arkansas’s KTHS hosted a show of Yazbeck playing solos mostly by Alexander Maloof in 1926. She played a similar program of Syrian piano solos in 1927 from station WFAA in Dallas and in Saint Louis on KMOX in 1931.

 

Louise Yazbeck took advantage of a wonderfully unique professional development opportunity when she took summer courses at Washington University in Saint Louis in 1929. Courses and subjects included “Principals of piano playing, Advanced Ear Training, Harmony and Melody writing, Harmony and Harmonic Analysis, Interpretation and Music History…folk songs, art song, sonata, polyphonic music,” and a host of other genres. Private piano lesson with Gottfried Golston, who had performed a concert at the Washington Hotel in Shreveport in 1928. Saint Louis served as home to St. Raymond’s and Saint Anthony the Hermit Maronite churches led by Rev. Joseph Karam and Rev. Youkim Stephan respectively. This was also where Maloof Phonograph records singer Anthony Shaptini was born and raised before he moved to Michigan.

The Shreveport Journal, 25 June 1931. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

Although in the opening years of the Great Depression and two years after the Romey lynching in Florida, Arab Americans living below the Mason-Dixon founded the Southern Federation of Syrian and Lebanese American Clubs in 1931. According to the Federation website, its purpose remains “to promote pure Americanism, to maintain traditional fellowship, heritage, and culture, and to encourage educational, civic, and charitable projects.” The Southern Federation covers Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and even Southern California. The “Syr-Am-G” Sorority functioned under the umbrella of the Southern Federation in 1936 Yazbeck’s Shreveport home operated as its primary meeting place. Organized to “gain recognition for the Syrian population of Shreveport” to unite and study for social gatherings among both members and their friends,” Yazbeck held the position of first the sorority’s first president. In 1938, Louise Yazbeck assumed the position of state chairman of radio and international music relations of the Federation of Music clubs and radio committee chairperson of the Southern Federation. Recently, the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University acquired the organizational papers for the Southern Federation. The Khayrallah Center holds an undated letter sent from Yazbeck to Ameen Rihani.

Officers of "Syr-Am-G" Sorority, Louise Yazbeck in front row center. The Shreveport Journal, 3 February 1936. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

As radio came to eclipse phonograph records in the 1930s, stations Yazbeck had performed concerts on ranged from KMOX in St. Louis, WFAA in Dallas, KTHS in Hot Springs, KUT in Austin, and, of course, KWKH. All these had been stations that broadcast Yazbeck’s concerts in the 1920s and demand from audiences, especially regional diasporic listeners, meant continued listenership in the 1930s. Added to the program, in some instances, were Yazbeck’s growing cohort of pupils who also appeared on occasion. 

 

In 1939, Louise Yazbeck penned “The Good Old Shreveport Blues,” and donated copy of her composition to the Shreveport Memorial Library Archives.  In the same year, she and Eva Kouri composed and wrote a song for the Southern Federation of Syrian Lebanese Clubs. In 1952, she wrote and composed the song “Echoes”and she published a book of Middle Eastern proverbs. Neither Yazbeck, nor her music found their way onto the mahrajan or hafla scene.

Sheet music from Louise Yazbeck. Courtesy of the MMss 131Louisiana State University Archive,Noel Memorial Library, Shreveport.

 

Like other entertainers, nationally and internationally known, Yazbeck was among the hundred of musicians, comedians, actors, and major and minor celebrities active in the United Services Organization (USO) that helped United States soldiers and service members remain connected to family, home, and community during World War II and later wars, and entertained. Yazbeck performed less and less but she continued to actively teach music, take in new students, oversee their recitals, and participate in local and regional professional music organizations.

 

Sadly, Yazbeck lost her parents who roots in Shreveport’s Arab American community went back to the early twentieth century. Joseph Yazbeck passed in 1943 at the age of 65 and Najeeba Yazbeck died in 1954.Louise never seems to have married, although her sister and brother did. Extended family members lived in Lafayette, Louisiana and Rochester, New York.

Louise Yazbeck, The Shreveport Journal 26 May 1928. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

Sources on Syrian and Lebanese or Arab Americans in Shreveport and Louisiana, as a whole, are scarce beyond family histories. How did Arabs, as a racially liminal group, fair in the state with the most fluid and stratified racial categories in the United States? Those who assimilated culturally certainly mingled with whites of various ethnic backgrounds during the Jim Crow era and some, like George Khoury in Lake Charles, founded a well-known, Cajun, Creole, and Cajun-country record label that also dabbled in rhythm and blues. Obviously, those Arab Americans interested in music showed at least modest interest in blues and jazz, although no more than many white or multiracial people in Louisiana. Certainly, historical connections between French missionaries, Maronites, and the post-World War I French mandate, meant that bilingual or trilingual Arab immigrants and Arab Americans easily moved within and between racialized public and private spaces. By the time opposition to desegregation and Civil Rights protests in Louisiana gained national attention, Arab Americans in state stood on both sides and in the middle of the struggle for desegregation and equal rights for African Americans. The scant evidence that emerged in researching this post suggests Arab Americans were far more likely to associate with and socialize amongst themselves or with Anglo-American whites than people of with people of French or African descent. Most African Americans in Shreveport tended to be Methodist and connected to the Little Union Church which operated as the strategic base for Civil Rights struggle in Shreveport.

 

During this time and into her later life, Louise Yazbeck emersed herself in the world of classical, popular, and, sometimes, folk music of Southwest Asia. In addition to charter membership in the Greater Shreveport Music Teachers Association, Louise Yazbeck remained active in the B-Natural Music Club from the 1930s through the 1990s, the Quota Club from 1930 until 1973, the Shreveport Regional Arts Council, the local Little Theater until 1978, the National Society for Arts & Letters from 1951 to 1986, and financially support and recognized as a special musical guest of the Shreveport Symphony and Shreveport Opera. As late as 1980-81, Yazbeck served as area music representative of the Shreveport chapter of the National Society for Arts & Letters. The following year, she was special guest on the Shreveport Opera’s KCOZ-FM 100.1 concert.

 

On Monday, July 10, 1995, Louise M. Yazbeck died after an illness that lasted several years. Her siblings were no longer living; her nieces and nephews lived as close as Shreveport and Covington and as far away as Dallas, Texas and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A lasting part of her musical legacy are at least two of the songs she composed “The Good Old Shreveport Blues” and “Southern Federation of Syrian Lebanese American Clubs” song. 

Richard M. Breaux

@Midwest Mahjar