Kür is the Turkish name of the river that rises in northeastern Anatolia and flows through Georgia and Azerbaijan into the Caspian Sea, known in English as the Kura, and the first line of this song that reached the card speaks of its bank: "Kür gıragının acep sayun(?) gôhı var." Zekeriya Demiray, who sang the song for the collecting team in Amasya on the sixth of July 1943, is registered in the catalogue's index of performers as a man of central Amasya. The melody has thus remained a recording taken from the voice of an Amasya performer, yet one whose name and words recall a distant geography. It does not appear under Amasya in the TRT repertoire; its words and notation have not been published.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not registered under the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Place and date of collection: central Amasya, 6 July 1943 (the place is in square brackets in the catalogue)
  • Regional attribution: recorded in Amasya; because its name points to the Kür river, its attribution is disputed
  • Source person: Zekeriya Demiray; in the index of performers his home is central Amasya
  • Collected by: the Ankara State Conservatory team: Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen, technician Rıza Yetişen
  • Published source: Celal Volkan Kaya, Ankara Devlet Konservatuvarı'nın Halk Müziği Alan Araştırmaları Kataloğu (İTÜ, 2014), no. 3635
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive, disc 1116/A-1
  • Genre: folk song (türkü)
  • Mode, rhythm: not recorded
  • Words and music: recorded as anonymous
  • Source link: no TRT link; the details are in Kaya's catalogue

Lyrics

Kür gıragının acep sayun(?) gôhı var

"Gırağı" means its bank or edge; "acep" means I wonder. Kaya places a question mark in brackets beside words whose reading or accuracy he is unsure of, so the word "sayun" could not be read from the card with confidence. The marked vowel in "gôhı" is likewise a trace of the collectors' effort to put local pronunciation into writing. The skeleton of the line can be read as "I wonder, does the bank of the Kür have ..."; the two missing words are not enough to complete the meaning, and to venture a guess would be to load the line with a meaning not found in the source. The rest of the song is nowhere in print; the text has to be sought in the photocopy of the card acquired by TRT, the melody on disc 1116 in the Folklore Archive.

Regional Attribution

The song's name and first line mention the Kür river; this associates the melody with songs in the speech of Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. The source person's home, on the other hand, is written in the index of performers as central Amasya. In the same session Demiray sang one more piece that recalls the east: Bayatı (Atüstü Bayatı). When the two recordings are set side by side, one sees that in 1943 the repertoire of a performer from Amasya also held melodies whose names point outside the region; when and by what route this melody came to Amasya, however, is unknown. Because the recording was made in Amasya, the work is counted among the melodies of Amasya, but it cannot be said to belong to the region.

Story

No printed information exists on who composed this song about the bank of the Kür, or why.

Musical Features

Scale, rhythm, range: all three are unknown. The recording is the first piece on disc 1116. The cards of the items numbered A-2 and B-1 on the same disc are not among the copies at TRT, so their contents are unknown; the last recording on side B is Demiray's "Segah".

Performers and Recordings

Demiray is the only singer on record for Kür Gırağı. The six recordings he gave the team are spread over two days: on 4 July "Irmakların Gümbürtüsü" and "Kaleden Atılır", on 6 July "Dımbıla Gız (Oyun Havası)", the bayatı, this song and "Segah". The Melody of Yeşilırmak treats Amasya's repertoire of folk songs and long songs as a whole.

Bibliography

Online sources