The same word appears on the card in two different spellings. In the title it is written "Taḫtadandır", with a special h, while in the first line that follows immediately it is spelled with a plain h: "Tahtadandır şu Mahmuduñ bacası". The ḫ in the catalogue stands for one of the signs Muzaffer Sarısözen used to show dialect features: Sarısözen noted that this letter was to be read like the Arabic letter khā (خ), and Celal Volkan Kaya rendered it with the ḫ used in present-day transliteration. Collected from Nuri Uysal in Gümüşhacıköy on 9 July 1943, the song has had neither its words nor its notation printed, and TRT did not take it into its repertoire.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not registered under the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Place and date of collection: Gümüşhacıköy, 9 July 1943 (both written explicitly on the card)
  • Source person: Nuri Uysal; farmer, year of birth on the card 1929, from the village of Derbentopruğu in the Saraycık subdistrict of Gümüşhacıköy; no instrument recorded
  • Collected by: Ankara State Conservatory; Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen, Rıza Yetişen
  • Published source: Celal Volkan Kaya, Ankara Devlet Konservatuvarı'nın Halk Müziği Alan Araştırmaları Kataloğu (İTÜ, 2014), recording list no. 3724
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive, disc 1137/A-2
  • Genre: folk song (türkü)
  • Mode, rhythm: not on the card
  • Lyrics and music: anonymous
  • Source link: there is no TRT entry; the details are in Kaya's catalogue

Lyrics

The line of the song that remains in the catalogue:

Tahtadandır şu Mahmuduñ bacası

In present-day Turkish it means "The chimney of that Mahmut is made of wood". The ñ at the end of "Mahmuduñ" is also one of Sarısözen's signs, and marks the nasal n that his own note defines as "like the sağır kâf". A single line thus records two dialect features that struck the collector's ear. Who Mahmut was, and what the wooden chimney leads to in the song, cannot be understood without the second line. Neither the rest of the song nor the notation of its melody is in any publication; the whole of it survives in Uysal's voice on side A of disc 1137, and the disc is today in the former Folklore Archive at the State Conservatory of Hacettepe University.

Story

The card tells more about the young man who sang the song than about the song itself: in the notes column for this farmer, born in 1929, his schooling is also recorded, in quotation marks, as "Üç sınıflı mektepten mezun" ("graduated from a three-class school"). No printed account has been found that ties the song's composition to anyone named Mahmut or to a particular house.

Musical Features

The dialect signs Sarısözen entered on the card record the pronunciation of the words, not of the melody. In which scale, with which rhythm and across what range Uysal sang the song is not written on the card. No instrument is given for him in the list of performers. The recording is second on side A of disc 1137.

Performers and Recordings

Uysal sang two songs for the team: first Bülbül (Bülbülün Ganedi Yeşil), then Tahtadandır. These two are the last recordings from Gümüşhacıköy in the catalogue; on the same side of the disc the sequence moves straight on to Merzifon, with the deyiş that Musa Aslan sang on the night of 9-10 July, which entered the TRT repertoire as Dem Be Dem Karşıma Gelen Bülbül. Uysal's fellow villager, the kaval player Osman Atmaca, had played six tunes onto disc 1136 just before him; of these, Gırnata Havası is described on a separate page. No recording of Tahtadandır sung after Uysal has been documented. For the place of Gümüşhacıköy's songs within the province's musical tradition, the general article is The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources