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

  Tanious Maroun Al-Blouzany: A Little-known Poet and Singer records for Maloof Records Tanious Maroun al-Blouzany, 1936. 29 August 1936, Al-Hoda newspaper. Courtesy of the Moise A. Khayallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, North Carolina State University. Back in March 2023, I purchased seven Maloof Phonograph records and one A.J. Macksoud disc from a fellow collector. Much to my surprise, he had two Maloof discs—#4000/4001 and #9003/9004—that I had never seen before, one of which I had only ever read about. The elusive Maloof singer Samy Attaya appears on #9003/9004. However, disc #4000/4001 was so faded and worn that I could not make out the musician listed on the label; all I could read with any certainty was “OUZANY.” I asked Excavated Shellac’s Jonathan Ward about both records. Back in 2019, I had written a post about Samy Attaya , but at the time, I had never actually seen or heard one of his records. I have since attached the digitized audio transfer to Midwest M...

  Our Eleven-Year Search for Maloof Phonograph Records Singer Lateefy Abdou Photo of Lateefy Abdou. Courtesy of Samuel J. Hazo & Samuel R. Hazo Here at Midwest Mahjar, I have more 78 rpm records on the Maloof Phonograph Company label by Lateefy Abdou than by almost any other Maloof recording artist, except Louis Wardiny and Salim Doumani . Yet, for over eleven years, I came no closer to uncovering any biographical information about the woman who released thirty-eight sides on one of Little Syria’s most popular and recognizable labels. Who was Lateefy Abdou? Where was Lateefy Abdou? Why had no one ever celebrated her story? Why could we only find traces of her in Maloof Records advertisements and nowhere else? I searched and searched, returning to the same sources over and over, but I only came up with women who shared a similar name—women who were married with children by 1924, and none whose birth name or maiden name was Lateefy Abdou. Furthermore, the traces of evidence we ...

  George Farah & Wafa Nageeb Tour Brazil, the US, and Record for Alamphon   George Farah & Wafa Nageeb, c. 1945. MOW 1 December 1948. Courtesy of the Moise A. Khayrallah Center of Lebanese Diaspora Studies. North Carolina State University. Farid Alam Al-Din built Alamphon Records from the estate of legendary record seller and independent label imprint creator A.J. Macksoud. Although first housed on Washington Street in Manhattan’s Little Syria, in the minds of most people Alamphon Records is best remembered for its World War II location at 123 Court Street or its post-1954 storefront at 182 Atlantic Avenue. Alamphon featured high-quality dubs of records Mohammed Abdel Wahab, Yousef Taj, Farid El Atrash, Asmahan, Layla Morad, Mohamed El-Bakar , and others pressed in Lebanon and Egypt but it also became associated with immigrant musicians to the United States such as George Berberi , Sana and Amer Kadaj, Jamili Matouk , Yousef Hatem, Toufic Barham , and Elie Baida . Le...