Made of three short couplets and a refrain, "Meryem Suya Gidiyor" shows a girl in three separate moments: her hair sways as she goes for water, her hair touches the ground as she milks the cow, her family's house stands across the way and their camels graze. In the notation her name is written "Meyrem", as the region pronounces it; the title in the TRT repertoire is "Meryem". When it was recorded from Kazım Aygül's voice on 9 July 1943, the Ankara State Conservatory's list entered it as "Meyrem Oyunu", a name which shows that it was sung to a dance.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: 1873 (TRT THM repertoire, kırık hava)
  • Region: Amasya; "Merzifon/Gümüşhacıköy" in the repertoire, Gümüşhacıköy in the conservatory catalogue (the cataloguer's estimate), Merzifon in Yücel
  • Source performer: Kazım Aygül; the notation names him as the singer as well
  • Collected by: Ankara State Conservatory
  • Date of collection: 9 July 1943
  • Transcribed by: Ateş Köyoğlu
  • Mode: Çargah and Bayati Şiraz scales (Demircioğlu gives Çargah only); final and closing note Do
  • Metre: 4/4
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • TRT link: as TRT has no public page for individual works, the catalogue data and lyrics of notation no. 1873 were read on Repertükül.

Lyrics

Meyrem suya gidiyor
Saçları gel gel ediyor
Bağlantı:
Gız Meyrem Meyrem Meyrem
Gözleri yaşlı Meyrem
Rastıklı kaşlı Meyrem
Meyrem inek sağıyor
Saçları yere değiyor
(Bağlantı)
Garşıdadır evleri
Yayılır develeri
(Bağlantı)

Few words need explaining. Gel gel etmek describes hair that sways as she walks, as if beckoning. Rastık is the black dye used to darken the eyebrows; rastıklı kaşlı Meyrem is a girl who has painted her brows and made herself fine. Yayılır develeri says that their camels are grazing. In the refrain, "tearful eyes" and painted brows stand side by side without adding a story to the words; each couplet is content with its own image, which is the familiar habit of mani-style songs. Turned into prose, the couplets say: Meyrem is going for water, her hair beckons; girl Meyrem, Meyrem, tearful-eyed Meyrem, Meyrem of the painted brows; Meyrem is milking the cow, her hair touches the ground; their house is across the way, their camels are grazing.

The last couplet turns up in another song of the Amasya repertoire. "Karşıdadır Evleri", registered in the TRT repertoire as no. 51, opens with exactly the couplet "Karşıdadır evleri / Yayılır develeri" and goes straight on to a line that runs "Oturmuş inek sağar", "she sits milking the cow"; the girl milking a cow is in "Meryem Suya Gidiyor" too. In that song a refrain with the cries "hele yandım" and "diley diley sallan da gel" comes between the lines. No study was found examining whether the two melodies are related; the shared couplet shows that mani lines passed from song to song within the same region.

Story

The question of who Meyrem was goes unanswered in the sources, and no tradition about whom the song was sung for has been written down. The disc list records nothing beyond the title, the date and the singer, and the words themselves tell no story; they show a girl in a few moments.

Musical Features

The repertoire data define the melody as a combination of the Çargah and Bayati Şiraz scales. The tune settles on Do and ends there too; the lowest note is Si, below the final, the highest Sol, a range of six notes. In Nail Demircioğlu's table of 48 songs Çargah appears in only two works: "Evleri Görünüyor" and this song. Demircioğlu does not mention the second scale. The metre is 4/4.

In his 2016 article on the folk songs of Merzifon, Haluk Yücel states that 28 of the 94 songs he examined are mani in character, that songs of this type are sung with an ear to rhyme and harmony rather than unity of subject, and gives the words of "Meryem Suya Gidiyor" as an example. The brevity of the couplets and the refrain that returns after each one fit this observation. Two years later, in his table of genres, Yücel puts it among the kırık havas as "Meyrem suya gidiyor (Merzifon)".

Performers and Recordings

The repertoire credits the performance to Kazım Aygül as well. Kazım Aygül also sang in Gümüşhacıköy, on that same day, "Parçalı", "Livana" (recorded as a dance tune), a güzelleme by Kul Hüseyin, a deyiş by Pir Sultan Abdal, a Kırklar Semahı and an elegy; he is also the source performer of no. 1870 in the TRT repertoire, "Yazı Yazdım Sokuya". Who is heard in the recording beside the online notation is not stated. Later performances, from within TRT's roster or outside it, do not appear in the sources. The repertoire as a whole is described in The Melody of the Yeşilırmak: Amasya Folk Songs and Long Airs.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources