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

  Only Traces of Evidence Remain Highlighting the Illusive Career and Life of Philip Catzeflis Philip Catzeflis "Nasheed No. 1". #7005 A. Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection. Collectors of 78 rpm phonograph records, and more specifically, Arabic-language records produced and released for Arabic-speaking audiences in the United States are without a doubt familiar with Richard K. Spottswood’s seven volume Ethnic Music on Record . A monumental feat of discipline-altering proportions, Ethnic Music on Record documents the cylinder and phonographic records made in the United States from the 1890s until mid-1942 by various so-called ethnic and linguistic minorities. Spottswood’s work remains foundational to study of non-English language phonograph records in the US before World War II, and those interested in Arabic-music during this period would be remiss to ignore it. It is Spottswood’s Volume 5, that many collectors first encounter the names of Victor, Columbia, Maloof, and ...

 Constantine Elias Souss (singer, oudist) Constantine Souss or Constantine Souse.  April1920 New Victor Arabian Records Supplement .  Permission Amr Nosehy & Raphael Cormack. Courtesy of NYPL. Constantine Elias Souss (also Souse, Sooss, Sous) was born 16 June 1887 or 1891 in Jerusalem, Palestine. He first traveled via Haifa to the United States in 1903 and sought residency in 1910.  Whether he had any formal music training remains unclear. He lived in  Charleston, West Virginia, Detroit, Michigan, Brooklyn, New York, Fall River, Massachusetts, and later in Los Angeles, California. Nearly every city he lived in was or became home to fairly sizable Greater Syrian populations. Remarkably, West Virginia had 3,200 residents of Syrian descent and 300 of these resided in Charleston. Documents don't reveal whether Constantine moved directly to Charleston or if he lived somewhere else in the United States before he settled here. Souss appears in...

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...