"Sabah olmuş, karşı bele gün vurmuş" (morning has come, the sun has struck the ridge opposite): the name of this song is a full line describing the moment the morning sun reaches the mountain shoulder across the way, the slope of a ridge or pass. This song attributed to Amasya appears only in two tables of the study Haluk Yücel published in 2018. Yücel counts it among the measured songs and marks it in the 4/4 column of his metre table; the rest of the words, the score of the melody and who sang it remain outside these tables.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; it does not appear on the Amasya list of the TRT repertoire
  • Region: Amasya
  • Genre: kırık hava, a measured song (Yücel, Table 5)
  • Metre: 4/4 (Yücel, Table 6)
  • Makam (mode): not given piece by piece in the source
  • Source person, collector, place and date of collection: not in the source
  • Words and music: no author is named
  • Source publication: Haluk Yücel, 2018, pp. 380 and 384
  • Link: there is no TRT link; Yücel's article (PDF)

Lyrics

Nothing beyond the line used as the name is known. Yücel also classified the songs by subject, but because he gives that classification only as totals it cannot be seen whether this song falls under love, separation or some other heading. Nor do the words or the score turn up in any other source published under Amasya.

Its Story

No tradition says which mountain the "ridge opposite" struck by the sun might be. No written account of how the song came to be made has been found either.

Musical Features

Two marks are at hand: measured song and 4/4. Yücel states that 4/4 is the most frequent metre among the 89 Amasya folk songs he examined, with 28 songs written in it; "Sabah olmuş" belongs to that group. The modes, however, Yücel gives only as totals, so which scale the melody rests on remains open.

Performers and Recordings

Yücel says he gathered his material from the TRT repertoire, from folk song albums and from songs long sung among the people, but he does not show song by song which of these each came from. For that reason the song has no documented singer. The folk song repertoire of Amasya is described in The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources