This song, which asks the bath-keeper "which of the beauties came to your bath", is the form recorded in Gümüşhacıköy of a text collected with the same line in distant corners of Anatolia. The conservatory team took it on disc from Aşir Sirke on 9 July 1943. The other two pieces Sirke sang that day were taken into the TRT repertoire; "Ey Hamamcı" was left out, and its words and notation went unprinted.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not registered under the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Place of collection: Gümüşhacıköy
  • Source person: Aşir Sirke ("Âşık Sirke" in Haluk Yücel)
  • Collected by: the Ankara State Conservatory team: Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen and the technician Rıza Yetişen
  • Date of collection: 9 July 1943
  • Published source: Celal Volkan Kaya, Ankara Devlet Konservatuvarı'nın Halk Müziği Alan Araştırmaları Kataloğu (İTÜ, 2014), recording list no. 3713
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive, disc 1135/A-4
  • Genre: folk song (türkü)
  • Mode, rhythm: not recorded
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Source link: there is no TRT page; the details are in Kaya's catalogue

Lyrics

Ey hamamcı hamamıña gözellerden kim geldi

"O bath-keeper, which of the beauties came to your bath?" The ñ in "hamamıña" is the catalogue's equivalent of the sign Sarısözen used on the cards for the nasal n of local speech; "gözel" is the Gümüşhacıköy pronunciation of "güzel", beautiful. The line turns to the man who keeps the bath-house and asks which beauty has gone inside. The one addressed is the bath-keeper; the one wondered about is the unseen beloved.

How the song goes on after the question cannot be learned from any published text. The verses Sirke sang must remain on the photocopy of the card kept at TRT, though Kaya also notes that some cards have faded or been lost over time. The melody itself is on side A of disc 1135, which holds the Gümüşhacıköy recordings.

Collections and Variants

The conservatory archive holds two more recordings that open with the same line. One was taken from Ayşe Dadı in Seydişehir on 14 July 1940 as "Ey hamamcı bu hamama gözellerden kim gelir", the other from Halil Ertuğrul in Burdur on 4 July 1942 as "Ey hamamcı hamamıña güzellerden kim gelir". The Gümüşhacıköy recording says "kim geldi" (who came), the others "kim gelir" (who comes). The difference is small; a question asked in the past tense describes someone in pursuit of something that has already happened. How close the three recordings are in melody cannot be compared, as their notations have not been published.

Story

That the same words were collected in three different provinces between 1940 and 1943 suggests that they rest less on a particular event than on a formula passed from mouth to mouth. The interpretation comes from the spread of the recordings alone; no source telling how the song came to be was found.

Musical Features

Side A of disc 1135 shows how work was organised that day, for four pieces were recorded on it one after another: the first two were sung by Kazım Aygül ("Livana" and a piece beginning "Elinde bıçak yarim"), the third is Sirke's "Nazlanı, Nazlanı", and the fourth "Ey Hamamcı". Kaya states that from 1943 onwards an average of three or four pieces could be fitted onto one side of a disc; four recordings sharing the same side can also be explained by this. On the scale and metre of the melody, however, the card is silent.

Performers and Recordings

The source person appears under the name "Âşık Sirke" in Haluk Yücel's article of 2023. The "Nazlanı, Nazlanı" that Sirke sang on this disc passed into the TRT repertoire as Dostun Bahçasına Girsem, and the "Gül Türküsü" on side B of the same disc as Sabahtan Uğradım Pir Divanına. No later recording of "Ey Hamamcı" is known. The songs of Gümüşhacıköy and the other districts are described together in The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources