The team's work in Gümüşhacıköy opened with this song on 9 July 1943: the first entry for the district in the catalogue is "Fadimem", sung by Bektaş Yıldız. The first line written on the card is "Asgere gediyom aclon(?) geyersiñ", and it sets up a moment of farewell in which a young man leaving for the army addresses his Fadime. The TRT repertoire did not take up this song of farewell, and its words and notation have never seen print.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not registered under the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Place of collection: Gümüşhacıköy
  • Source person: Bektaş Yıldız
  • 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. 3698
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive, disc 1132/A-1
  • 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

Asgere gediyom aclon(?) geyersiñ

In modern spelling the line means "Askere gidiyom, ... giyersin": "I am going to the army, you will wear ...". The middle word is given in the catalogue with a question mark, meaning that the cataloguer could not read it with confidence; guessing at its meaning could lead to misreading the line. The one leaving speaks, and the one left behind is Fadime. What the young man tells her she will wear, however, cannot be understood until that word is deciphered.

Yıldız's voice is on side A of disc 1132 in the Folklore Archive; the second recording on the same side, again in his voice, is "Toḫadıñ Mezerliği". That disc and the copy of the card at TRT are the two documents left of the song. The full words and the notation appear in no printed source.

Collections and Variants

The conservatory archive also holds songs called Fadime or Fadimem from other regions. Recordings were made in Alaşehir in 1938 beginning "Fatmam Fatmam has bahçanın yolları", in Çorum in 1939 beginning "Fadimemin evinde gandilli fener", and in Göksun in 1941 beginning "Çorap milinen olur". None of them opens with a line about leaving for the army; what they share is the beloved's name. The word "gandilli" in the recording from neighbouring Çorum recalls the name of the "Gandilli" güzelleme that Bektaş Yıldız sang the same day, but there is no documented link between the two pieces.

Story

Who Fadime was, and whether the song was made about a real parting for military service or whether words circulating in the region passed into Yıldız's mouth, is unknown; no published account of the matter was found. Even if the card held a note on whom the source person learned the song from, it could not be learned from the catalogue, because Kaya deliberately left out of his lists both the lyrics and the information on how sung pieces had been learned.

Musical Features

Bektaş Yıldız's saz appears in the catalogue's appendix of instruments, where its tuning is entered on the card as "bozuk tertip", the bozuk tuning. From this it may be supposed that Yıldız sang his songs to his own saz; but as the recording list does not show which instrument was played in each piece, this accompaniment cannot be confirmed for "Fadimem". Mode and metre were not written on the card.

Performers and Recordings

Yıldız gave the team eight pieces that day. Of these, "Toḫadıñ Mezerliği" reached the TRT repertoire and is discussed on the page Tokat'ın Mezerliği; for "Fadimem", no performance other than the 1943 disc is known. For the other songs collected in Gümüşhacıköy, see The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources