The song's title is a reproach addressed to a river: "Yeşilırmak ne akarsın boşuna", Yeşilırmak, why do you flow in vain. This line, which calls by name the river running through the middle of Amasya, appears as the title of a work in Haluk Yücel's article on the words and music of Amasya folk songs. Everything known about the melody comes from two tables in that study: the type table places it with the kırık havas, songs in a fixed metre, and the metre table marks it in the 5/8 column. Beyond this line the words remain unpublished, as do the names of the source performer who gave the song and of its collector.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; the TRT repertoire has no work of this name attached to the Amasya region
  • Region: Amasya
  • Type: kırık hava (Yücel 2018, Table 5, p. 380)
  • Metre: 5/8 (Yücel 2018, Table 6, p. 384)
  • Mode (makam): not given song by song
  • Source performer, collector, transcriber, date of collection: not shown in the source
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Link: no TRT link; Haluk Yücel, 2018

Lyrics

The single surviving line means, in modern Turkish, "Yeşilırmak, why do you flow for nothing". The "ne" here is the old and widespread form of the question in the sense of "why". With the following lines unknown, it cannot be said what grief lies behind this reproach to the river. None of the known publications carries the full text or the notation.

Story

Why the river is reproached was never set down as a tale, and no written witness ties the song to an event, a death or a parting.

Musical Features

Eight works fall in the 5/8 column of Yücel's metre table, and "Yeşilırmak ne akarsın boşuna" closes that group of eight. The same column also holds "Zilha Gelini", Hay Edüben Meydan Harman Başında Duran, Eğlen Sana Bir Nasihat Edeyim and Ben de Çıktım Fodullu'nun Üstüne; the row immediately above it in the table is "Turâb ol gönül, turâb ol". In Yücel's count, 4/4, 2/4, the nine-beat metres and the freely sung works are all more numerous than this five-beat metre. Because the article's makam table gives only totals, the scale in which the song is sung, its range and its sectional structure are unknown.

Performers and Recordings

Yücel writes that he drew on the TRT repertoire, on songs found on albums and on those long sung among the people, but he does not state which work came from which. For this song neither a singer's name nor an album reference is given, so where the recording came from cannot be traced. The river is named once more in Yücel's list: "Yeşil akar Amasya'nın ırmağı", recorded as a kırık hava, is a separate work. A wider view of the region's melodies is given by the general article named after this same river, The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources