In Haluk Yücel's table of the metres of Amasya folk songs, this song's row carries two asterisks: one in the 4/4 column, the other in the 8/8. Whether the song is sung in two different metres, moves from one to the other between sections, or whether two different scores are meant, the table does not explain. Its name is a line that breaks off a scene halfway: as the dark-skinned beauties come and go. In his 2018 study Yücel counts the piece as a kırık hava, a song in fixed metre; its name has not been found in any other source.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; it is not among the Amasya works of the TRT repertoire
  • Genre: kırık hava (folk song in a fixed metre)
  • Region: Amasya
  • Source person: not in the source
  • Collector and transcriber: not in the source
  • Date of collection: not in the source
  • Makam (mode): not stated
  • Metre: 4/4 and 8/8 (two columns marked in the table)
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Source publication: Haluk Yücel 2018, Table 5 p. 379, Table 6 p. 382
  • Location in an archive: not written
  • Source link: Yücel 2018; there is no TRT link

Lyrics

Who the dark beauties were, and who watched them, cannot be learned from the words, because the text of the song appears in no printed collection, and no score of it has been published. Two publications are known that gather the folk songs of Amasya in book form: Burhan Özbakır's Amasya Türküleri, published in 1988 in the Amasya Municipality Cultural Publications, and the book of the same name that Özbakır prepared with S. T. Sünbül and that the municipality published again in 2010. Whether this piece is in one of them could not be checked; the contents of neither book could be found online.

Story

In which village, at which wedding, from whose lips it came is not known. No account of its making has been printed or recorded in any other way.

Musical Features

The double mark gives the piece a place of its own in Yücel's metre table: no other row in the table has two columns marked at once. 4/4 is the metre found in 28 of the 89 songs Yücel counts and the most frequent in this listing. 8/8, by contrast, occurs in only four rows of the table; one of them is Dostun Bahçasına Girsem from Merzifon, another Dağdan Kestim Çınarı from Taşova. Yücel's text does not discuss this song's metre separately. Its mode, as with the other works, is not given piece by piece.

Performers and Recordings

Its neighbours in the genre table are "Koyun geliyor, koyun da" and "Bahçelerde bamiye, Bayılıyom yemiye"; all three are songs outside the TRT repertoire whose information is limited to these tables. No information was found about a singer, a record or a radio recording of it. The general picture of the melodies collected in Amasya and its districts is drawn by The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Online sources