Three basic facts in this song's entry, the disc number, the place of recording and the date, stand in square brackets in the catalogue. Celal Volkan Kaya uses square brackets for information missing from the card or corrected by him because it did not fit the course of the journey; so the fact that "Irmakların Gümbürtüsü" was taken onto side B of disc 1105 in Amasya on 4 July 1943 is known not from the card itself but from the cataloguer's inference. The singer is Zekeriya Demiray, and the first line was recorded as "Üç güzel oturmuş karaya bakmaz". Neither its notation nor its full words have been published, and it has no counterpart registered under Amasya in the TRT repertoire.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none
  • Source person: Zekeriya Demiray; head of a village office, from central Amasya, year of birth on the card 1323 in the Rumi calendar (1907-1908)
  • Place and date of collection: Amasya, 4 July 1943 (both completed by Kaya)
  • Collected by: the Ankara State Conservatory team: Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen, Rıza Yetişen
  • Genre: folk song (türkü)
  • Mode, rhythm: unknown
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive, disc [1105/B-1]
  • Source publication: Kaya's catalogue, no. 3575; the thesis page at İTÜ. There is no TRT link

Lyrics

Üç güzel oturmuş karaya bakmaz

The first half of the line is clear: three beauties have sat down somewhere. The second half can be pulled in two directions. If "kara" is taken to mean dark-skinned, the line says that the beauties pay no heed to someone dark, perhaps the singer himself; if the word is taken as "land" or "shore", one may imagine the beauties turning their faces elsewhere, towards the water, for instance, and this second reading also fits the rivers in the title. Only the following lines could tell which is right. The text of the song is not in the catalogue, because Kaya left the words on the cards out of his lists; the places to look are the TRT copies of the cards and the disc itself.

Story

The title "Irmakların gümbürtüsü", the roar of the rivers, evokes the rumble of swollen waters. Which rivers are meant is not written on the card; its being recorded in Amasya brings the Yeşilırmak to mind, but we do not know whether a river is named in the song. Nor does any source relate in whose voice, or about what event, the song was sung.

Musical Features

The cards are kept at TRT by province, and those for Amasya, as Kaya notes, are photocopies of copies later transferred from the original cards onto a new form. The many bracketed details the catalogue gives for this recording may be connected with the gaps left by this chain of copying. On the melody itself, no published data exist.

Performers and Recordings

As far as is known, only Zekeriya Demiray has sung the song on record. Disc 1105 carries the recordings of the team's first day in Amasya, and three of its six pieces later entered the TRT repertoire. On side A are the songs of Abdullah Çakırer and Muhlis Orçun, joined by Muharrem Sorgu in the first: Amasya'nın Dağları and Çakallar'dan İner Vermiş Kömürü; on side B, after this song, come Demiray's "Kaleden Atılır", Mustafa Saçlı's song recorded as "Höngül Höngül" and entered in the repertoire as Kız Pınar Başında Testi Doldurur, and "Kuşköprünün", again from Saçlı. The general story of the folk songs of Amasya: The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources