Most rows in Haluk Yücel's list are written with the first line of the song; Anam Ağlar ("My mother weeps"), together with the three rows that follow it, carries instead a short title beginning with capital letters: Anam Ağlar, Viran Dağlar, Kızılırmak, Üç Gün Önce Gördüm. The last seven rows of the table are given over to melodies sung without a fixed metre, and in the table of genres this name opens that run of long songs. It is marked only in the uzun hava column of the table of genres and in the free column of the table of metres.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not attached to the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Region: Amasya
  • Genre: uzun hava (long song)
  • Metre: free
  • Makam: not stated
  • Source person, collector, place and date of collection: none
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Source publication: Haluk Yücel, 2018, Table 5 (p. 380), Table 6 (p. 384)
  • Location in the archive: unknown
  • Link: there is no TRT link; Yücel's article

Lyrics

"Anam ağlar", that is, my mother weeps. The source does not say whether these two words are the beginning of a line, part of a refrain or merely a name given to the melody later. Neither the words of the long song nor a sound recording or score has passed into any known publication; the melody is known through a record consisting of two marks in Yücel's tables.

Story

No account of who wept and why, or of an event that gave rise to the long song, has been recorded.

Musical Features

For long songs, sung without metre and as if speaking, Yücel turns to the definitions of Süleyman Şenel and Muzaffer Sarısözen: the rhythm is free, but the scale is fixed and the melody's course within that scale is bound to patterns. He also mentions that in different regions of Turkey they take names such as bozlak, maya, garip, kerem, hoyrat, divan, yanık and ağıt. Which of these Anam Ağlar comes close to, and whether it has a share in the makam table, cannot be read from the article. Yücel says that seven of the 89 songs are long songs, and in the table these seven follow one another.

Performers and Recordings

The name of one of its neighbours in the run, "Kızılırmak", was also used on the 1943 collection cards for a song that later entered TRT as Allah Allah Dedik Ata Bindirdik. The name Anam Ağlar, however, occurs neither in TRT's Amasya list nor in the 1943 collection catalogue; nor does Yücel show where he took the melody from. For this reason it has no known singer. The unmetred melodies collected in Amasya, from bozlak to lament, are also a subject of The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources