Its title is a call spoken in the local dialect: "Ana, ben gediyom ele." On the last row of Haluk Yücel's list of Amasya folk songs, this melody is the last of the seven long songs sung without a fixed metre in the table; it is marked as uzun hava in the table of genres and as free in the table of metres.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not found in the Amasya section of the TRT repertoire
  • Region: Amasya
  • Genre: uzun hava (long song)
  • Metre: free
  • Makam: not in the source
  • Source person, collector, date of collection: not written
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Source publication: Haluk Yücel, 2018, Table 5 (p. 380) and Table 6 (p. 384)
  • Location in the archive: cannot be deduced from the article
  • Link: there is no TRT link; the article

Lyrics

Ana ben gediyom ele

Put into everyday Turkish, the line says "Mother, I am going to strangers' land." "Gediyom" is the dialect pronunciation of "gidiyorum" (I am going) common in Amasya and its surroundings; "el" carries the dictionary senses of stranger, other people, another country. Who is going "to strangers", and for what reason, cannot be learned from a single line. Its other lines, a score or a recording of its sound are nowhere to be found in print; Yücel's tables give nothing beyond its title either.

Story

Who it is that goes among strangers, and what event the long song followed, no published source relates.

Musical Features

Yücel quotes Sarısözen, who defines the long song as a melody that is free in measure and rhythm yet has a known scale, its course within the scale bound to set patterns. He assigns seven of Amasya's 89 songs to this genre and lines them all up at the very end of the table. This small run opens with Anam Ağlar and closes with Dağlar dağladı beni anam and this melody. Twelve rows are marked in the free column of the table of metres (the text says 11): seven of them are these long songs, two are melodies counted in the table of genres as having features of both long and metred song, and three are metred songs. In which makam scale Ana ben gediyom ele is sung, however, is not stated.

Performers and Recordings

A melody called "Kızılırmak" on the 1943 collection cards entered the TRT repertoire as Allah Allah Dedik Ata Bindirdik; whether the Kızılırmak that Yücel counts among the long songs is the same melody cannot be determined. No such counterpart could be found for Ana ben gediyom ele. Since Yücel does not write down the melody's source, no singer's name can be given either. The whole recorded repertoire of the province, unmetred melodies included, can be read together in The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources