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

  Rev. Boutros Kahwagee (Pedro Kahwagi): The Recovered Voice of an Arab-Mexican Maronite Priest Rev. Pedro Kahwagi, c. 1939. The Day 9 May 1939. Courtesy of Newspapers.com Most of the recording artists we’ve featured on Midwest Mahjar have been people who immigrated to the United States in some capacity or were born in the United States. Exceptions, however, have included Nourhane , Sami el-Shawwa , and Prince Mohiuddin . The 78 RPM disc with singing by "Rev. Boutros Kahwagee" threw us for a loop! We pruchased the disc in December 2021. There was no indication of where Kahwagee/Kahwagi recorded any music. It could have been in Syria, Lebanon, the United States, or some other country. During an initial search, we hit an immediate dead end. There was no "Boutros Kahwagee" we could find who lived in any part of the United States. Newspapers and Ancestry.com searches revealed very little. Consequently, we put this disc to the side and focused on other musicians and rec...

  Louis Kawam: Jamming with Arab American Musicians Old & Young Some of the best musicians ever, never front their own band. They are not among the orchestra or ensemble leaders, and if we’re fortunate enough, they have left behind a piece of their creative genius in a credited or uncredited recording. Perhaps their names escaped mention in the liner notes, or their surname shows up on a label suggesting they composed, wrote, or performed a piece, if for nothing else than pure posterity. Most of this is true for oudist Louis Kawam. Born 18 or 20 July 1913 in New York City, Elias Bashir Kawam entered the world one of three, and the only male child of his parents Bashir Abdallah Kawam and Assna Kawam. Immigrants from Aleppo and Damascus, Greater Syria in 1905, the couple crossed the ocean departing from Marseilles on board a shipped named the Roma and settled on the main west-east corridor of New York’s Little Syria two – Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. There at   178 Atlantic ...

  Antoine Hage: Life of a Second Wave Violinist/Oudist Living Between New York and California Antoine M. Hage with his violin, The Caravan 2 May 1957. Courtesy of Newspapers.com Closer to the turn of the twentieth century, in Buffalo, New York, some 350 Syrian immigrants and Syrian Americans lived in the city along the shores of Lake Erie and across the border from Canada. Buffalo's Syrian community in 1907 boasted at least two restaurants, approximately seven businesses with storefront properties, and Saint John Maronite Church (1904). Just 25 miles north, another 350 Syrians, seemingly more established, lived in Niagara Falls, New York. Social, cultural, and political ties soon bound the Syrian communities in the cities of Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and Utica (200 miles east with a Syrian population near 300) together.  The development of the hafla and mahrajan circuit in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s further accentuated the connections between these cities and local musicians f...