The song's name opens by introducing an instrument: a def, a frame drum, its skin stretched from leather ("Bir defim var deriden", I have a def made of hide). The name appears among the 89 entries of the tables in Haluk Yücel's 2018 article, which examines the folk songs of the Amasya region in terms of words and music, and the information that has come down to us amounts to two marks in those tables. Yücel places the piece among the kırık hava, the metred songs, and shows that it is written in 2/4. Like many songs in the tables, its name has the form of a line of verse; the table does not show whether this is the song's first line.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; it is not among the works registered to the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Genre: kırık hava (folk song in a fixed metre)
  • Region: Amasya
  • Source person, collector, transcriber: not given in the publication
  • Place and date of collection: unknown
  • Makam (mode): not stated
  • Metre: 2/4
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Source publication: Haluk Yücel, Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 5(22), 2018; Table 5 (genre) p. 379, Table 6 (metre) p. 382
  • Location in an archive: Yücel does not say from which collection or archive the piece was taken
  • Source link: Yücel 2018 (PDF); there is no TRT link

Lyrics

Neither the lines that follow the name nor the tune's notation have turned up in a printed source. Yücel says he identified the songs he examined "through a survey of the literature and the views of Turkish folk music specialists", but he does not show which book, record or archive each piece came from. Where the words are kept today is left open by this silence.

Story

No tradition has been published recording in whose hands the def was played, or whether the song was sung at weddings or for dancing. With nothing in hand but the name of an instrument, the story behind the song goes untold.

Musical Features

In Table 6 the asterisk stands in the 2/4 column. Of the 89 songs Yücel counts, 17 are written in this two-beat metre, and 2/4 comes second after 4/4 with its 28 pieces. In the genre table the piece is marked only in the kırık hava column. On mode, Yücel's table counts only totals and does not go down to individual pieces.

Performers and Recordings

In the genre table "Bir defim var deriden" stands between "Bahçelerde bamiye, Bayılıyom yemiye" and "Yar elmayı taşladın mı oy oy"; both its neighbours are songs outside the TRT repertoire whose names are likewise made of a line of verse. No singer's name, record or broadcast of the piece appears in the sources. The songs of Amasya that entered the TRT repertoire and the melodies known from other collections are described together in The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources