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

Metropolitan Samuel David Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection. Metropolitan Samuel David  (Daoud) was, the youngest of six children, born on August 26, 1893, to John Daoud Husson and Gazaly Haddad in Aita, Greater Syria (now Lebanon). In the tradition of people like cantor Mitri el Murr and Metropolitan Germanos Shehadi, he studied in school near Tripoli, Lebanon to become a part of the Antiochian Orthodox patriarchate and believed music could be an essential component of the ministry. He graduated from the Balamand Seminary in 1914 having studied with Mitri el Murr and became an ordained deacon in 1916. As an ordained deacon, Samuel David mastered Byzantine chanting and in 1920, he was elevated to Archimandrite and one year later, in 1921, he immigrated to the United States (some source suggest 17 June 1920). After World War I, he was appointed as pastor of St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Toledo, Ohio. The combination of the Bolshevik Revolution and the death of Arch...

Rt. Rev. Agapios Golam   Rev. Agapios Golam. 1943. Archimandrite Agapios Golam (1882-1946) was born 23 October 1881 or 1882 and immigrated to the US from Greater Syria in 1912 via passage on the S.S. Martha Washington . He first lived in New York’s Little Syria neighborhood and later moved to Brooklyn with hundreds of other Syrian-Lebanese and Syrian Americans. Golam spoke Arabic, Greek, and English. In August 1916, he accompanied Archbishop Germanos Shehadi on his travels around the United States. Among their stops were a few days spent in the Syrian-Lebanese Community in Williston, North Dakota. A significant number of emigrants from the Ottoman Diaspora settled in North Dakota in the early 1900s and took advantage of Homesteading policies.  The majority of people from Greater Syria who settled in North Dakota were from rural towns near Mount Lebanon, and this, in part, explains why they were attracted to farming in the equally rural Great Plains and Midwest...