The catalogue describes this work as a "Divan" and adds to its title the bracketed note "from Veli"; it is one of the eight pieces Bektaş Yıldız sang in Gümüşhacıköy on 9 July 1943. Its first line was written on the card as "Beni bir dost yareledi hey beğler". The words and notation of the Gümüşhacıköy recording have not been printed, but a deyiş beginning with the same line is in the TRT repertoire in a version collected in the Ladik district of Samsun.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not registered under the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Place of collection: Gümüşhacıköy
  • Source person: Bektaş Yıldız (saz)
  • Collected by: the Ankara State Conservatory team: Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen and the technician Rıza Yetişen
  • Date of collection: 9 July 1943
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive, disc 1133/A-1; no. 3702 in Kaya's catalogue
  • Genre: divan (as described on the card)
  • Mode, rhythm: not recorded for the Gümüşhacıköy recording
  • Words: Veli (the addition in the catalogue title); music anonymous
  • Source link: there is no TRT page; the recording's details are in Kaya's catalogue, and the details and words of the Ladik deyiş on Repertükül (TRT 311)

Lyrics

The first line recorded in the catalogue:

Beni bir dost yareledi hey beğler

"Yareledi" means wounded and "beğler" means gentlemen; the speaker opens by telling his listeners, the "gentlemen" of the gathering, of the wound a friend has dealt him. The rest of the text is not found in any published source. Since Kaya's catalogue makes it a principle not to reproduce the texts, the work has been left in two places: the written words on the card copy held by TRT, Yıldız's voice on the Folklore Archive's disc. The note "from Veli" may be one of the cases in which the cataloguer read the pen name from the words and added it to the title; since there are several folk poets named Veli, the poet cannot be identified from this clue.

Collections and Variants

Deyiş no. 311 in the TRT repertoire opens "Beni bir dost yaraladı beyler ey". Its source person is Cahit Çağlar of Ladik; Muzaffer Sarısözen collected and notated it. The first quatrain in the repertoire reads:

Beni bir dost yaraladı beyler ey
Çekerim yareyi ölmezsem eğer
El vurmuş hançeri sinemi deler
Sevdakar olurum görmezsem eğer

The dagger of the friend who wounded him is piercing his breast, yet the speaker says that if he does not die he will bear the wound, and that if he cannot see the beloved he will fall into love-sickness. No pen name occurs in the second quatrain of the Ladik text, so it does not confirm the name "Veli". The link between the two recordings lies only in the first line; whether their melodies resemble each other is unknown.

Story

From whom Bektaş Yıldız learned the divan, and how the work came to be made, are not mentioned in print; the catalogue's list of instruments, however, carries two notes from the cards about his saz: its tuning is written as "bozuk tertip", and it is said that "the frets fully match the intervals of the bozuk". Accordingly, Yıldız had tuned his saz to the bozuk tuning, and its frets agreed with the intervals of that tuning.

Musical Features

The description "divan" on the card does not sit easily with the form in the TRT repertoire. In folk music the divan is mostly a genre sung in free rhythm, like a long song; the Ladik deyiş in the TRT repertoire, by contrast, is a metred song in 4/4 time, in the Hüseynî scale, resting on La and moving within the eight notes from Sol to Sol. Whether the Gümüşhacıköy recording was really sung in free rhythm cannot be known until its notation is published.

Performers and Recordings

The only known performance of the Gümüşhacıköy version is Bektaş Yıldız's 1943 disc. One of Yıldız's recordings from the same day passed into the TRT repertoire and is described on the page Tokat'ın Mezerliği. For an overview of the region's repertoire of melodies: The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources