Of the four pieces Hüseyin Kılıç sang for the conservatory team in the village of Zigala on 5 July 1943, three were later taken into TRT's folk music repertoire; this halay is the only one left out. The song, which begins "Gelme ecel gelme, üç gün ara ver", sits on side A of disc 1108 between two neighbours: before it "İnce Çayır Biçilmez", after it the other halay, written on the card as "Haleylim" and entered in the repertoire as "Ben Bir Çakı Bıçağım". While the notation of its neighbours has been published, all that remains of "Gelme Ecel" is its first line.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; it has no counterpart registered under the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Place of collection: Zigala (today Aydınca) village, central Amasya
  • Source person: Hüseyin Kılıç; farmer, from the village of Uygur in the Ezine sub-district, year of birth on the card 1325 in the Rumi calendar (1909-1910)
  • Collected by: the Ankara State Conservatory team (Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen, the technician Rıza Yetişen)
  • Date of collection: 5 July 1943
  • Genre: folk song (türkü); described on the card as a "halay"
  • Mode, rhythm: not recorded
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Source publication: Celal Volkan Kaya's catalogue of the conservatory's field recordings, no. 3589 (İTÜ open archive); there is no TRT link
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive of the former Ankara State Conservatory, disc 1108/A-2

Lyrics

Gelme ecel gelme üç gün ara ver

The singer is addressing death: "O death, do not come; give me a pause of three days, a respite." What the three days are wanted for, whether to reach a loved one or to make peace with others before dying, is not in the line; with the rest of the text missing, the question stays unanswered. Kaya deliberately left the words on the cards out of his lists; the whole song may survive in the copies of the cards that TRT made in the 1970s. In print, neither the rest of the words nor the notation of the melody exists. Hüseyin Kılıç's voice is on the disc in the Folklore Archive, which passed to Hacettepe University.

Story

The cards say more about the singer than about the halay; neither a local account nor a study of how the song came into being has been published. According to Kaya's list of performers, Hüseyin Kılıç was a farmer, and his village was not Zigala but Uygur, in the Ezine sub-district. This must be why Uygur village appears as the place of collection in the entries for his three songs in the TRT repertoire: the repertoire recorded the singer's village, the conservatory card the place where the recording was made. The team worked in Zigala that day and evidently heard people from the surrounding villages there as well; the recordings of the minstrel Sadık Ayan, also from Uygur, are on the discs of the same day.

The title asking death for a respite is not alone in the archive. In 1937 the team recorded a piece called "Gelme Ecel Gelme" in Erzincan. The catalogue does not show whether the two recordings are related in melody; for now the likeness lies only in the name.

Musical Features

The description "halay" on the card suggests that the song was sung together with a dance; neither its mode nor its rhythm was recorded. "Haleylim", which Kılıç sang immediately afterwards, bears the same description, and its notation exists in the TRT repertoire; but the fact that the two halays stand side by side on the disc proves nothing about the melody of "Gelme Ecel". Whether the two resemble each other could only be learned by listening to the disc itself.

Performers and Recordings

Apart from Hüseyin Kılıç's voice on the 1943 disc, no performance of the halay is known. The singer's songs that entered the repertoire are described on separate pages of this site: İnce Çayır Biçilmez, Ben Bir Çakı Bıçağım (Haleylim Sevdiğim) and Gidiyom Deme Bana, recorded on disc 1111 the same day. The article that brings together all the folk songs and long songs of the region: The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources