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

  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...

  Garam Chiba: A True Mahjari Musician Garam Chiba, 2 December 1954. Courtesy of El Mundo Arabe .  I have written previously about how stage names and pseudonyms can cause a biographer enormous headaches when attempting to locate subjects. Musicians of Arab descent who lived portions of their lives in the Levant, Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, the United States and other countries remain particularly difficult to track down and locate. For several years now this was the case with our locating oudist and vocalist Garam Chiba. Ever persistent, I did not throw in the towel and with a deeper dive, I found a bit more than just the three articles - one in Arabic, one in Spanish, and one in Portuguese - I had uncovered previously. Garam Chiba was born Andre Joubran Chaibe to Maubaraque Khairallah and Joubran Chaibe on 22 October 1919 in the Sour municipality of Tyre, Greater Syria (today Lebanon). Tyre sits 50 miles south of Beirut and emerged as a Lebanese cultural hub where the first ...