Hüseyin, a carter known by the nickname Garip Hüseyin, sang five pieces for the conservatory's collectors in Amasya on 6 July 1943, and "Bülbül" was one of them. The slip gives him simply as "Hüseyin", without a surname; his trade and nickname are noted in the performers' list. The first line carried into the catalogue begins with an ellipsis: Celal Volkan Kaya, reading the slip, could not make out its opening words and was able to transcribe only "…nıḫdur golelim neynesem netsem". It was recorded on record side 1114/B-2. With no counterpart in the TRT repertoire, the song has had neither its full words nor its notation published.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; it is not registered to Amasya in the TRT repertoire
  • Region: central Amasya (place of recording estimated, in square brackets in the catalogue)
  • Source performer: Hüseyin, nicknamed Garip Hüseyin; a carter from central Amasya, birth year on the slip Rumi 1306 (about 1890); his instrument presumed in the catalogue to be the saz
  • Collected by: Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen, Rıza Yetişen (Ankara State Conservatory)
  • Date of collection: 6 July 1943
  • Archive location: former Ankara State Conservatory Folklore Archive (now at the Hacettepe University State Conservatory), record 1114/B-2; no. 3627 in Kaya's catalogue
  • Genre: türkü (folk song)
  • Mode, metre: unknown
  • Words and music: recorded as anonymous
  • Source link: there is no TRT entry; for the catalogue data see the Ankara State Conservatory catalogue
  • Overview article: The Melody of the Yeşilırmak

Lyrics

The fragment that could be carried over from the slip, in the cataloguer's spelling, is this:

…nıḫdur golelim neynesem netsem

"Neynesem netsem" is dialect for "ne eylesem, ne etsem", "what am I to do, what can I do", a phrase of helplessness. Both the reading and the meaning of "golelim" are uncertain; without the missing opening of the line one cannot say what it means, nor does this fragment reveal what it has to do with the nightingale. No printed collection gives the full words or a notation; the record itself lies among the 1943 recordings in the Folklore Archive holdings now at the Hacettepe University State Conservatory. Kaya writes that in 2014 he was not given access to the archive and compiled his catalogue from copies of the slips handed to TRT in the 1970s.

Story

Who gave the piece the name "Bülbül", Hüseyin himself or the collector who filled in the slip, is unknown. On where, for whom or on what occasion the song was sung, the printed sources are silent too.

Musical Features

There is no information on the scale, metre or structure of the tune. In the performers' list Garip Hüseyin's instrument is given in square brackets as the saz; this suggests that it was not written explicitly on the slip and is the cataloguer's inference. So it is not certain either whether he sang the song with the saz or with the voice alone.

Performers and Recordings

Garip Hüseyin sang five pieces for the team that day, and all of them went onto the records one after another: a bozlak beginning "Güzelin(?) yaylası tekerin beli", the "Beypazarı Havası" opening "Gafil idim bağladılar kolumu", "Berber", which begins "Berber dükkanına vardım", this "Bülbül", and a second bozlak beginning "Coşgun sular gibi çağlayub aḫma". None of them entered the TRT repertoire as an Amasya piece. Among the other performers recorded that day, Zekeriya Demiray's Bayatı (Atüstü Bayatı) is described on a page of its own.

Bibliography

Online sources