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Published on Leave a comment on Martha Schecter Forsyth, 1940–2023

This obituary was first published online by the Newton Tab on November 6, 2023.
This version gives additional photos and links for further context.

Black and white photo shows a bearded man, a seven year old boy, and a woman with long dark hair.
Dick, Peter, and Martha, 1980

Martha Schecter Forsyth died peacefully in her sleep early September 24, 2023 at age 82. Her son Peter Forsyth and "virtual sister" Pat Iverson were with her in her home of almost 50 years. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just weeks prior to her death. Dick, her husband of almost 40 years, died in 2014. She is survived by Peter, brother David Schecter, step-children Kristina and Matthew Forsyth, Matthew's wife Mary and their son Collen, cats Batko and Kalinka, and interconnected communities of friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers.

Portait of a smiling woman in her 40s.
Martha in her home, circa 1980
A smiling woman in her 70s in a colorful dress leads a line dance; several other people are depicted holding hands to her left.
Leading a dance, Dick's memorial, 2015
A colorfully dressed woman in her 80s poses for a photograph in a forest.
Hiking in the Blue Hills, 2022

Family and friends will celebrate Martha's life in May 2024, location and date to be announced here at martha.forsyths.org.

Remote participation will be available.

Throughout her life, Martha pursued interests and passions that drew her far from the ordinary. Her greatest impact derived from her tireless research of traditional Bulgarian folk singing. She traveled to Bulgaria more than two dozen times beginning in 1976, seeking out traditional singers in small villages and recording their songs. Grants from IREX, Fulbright, and community organizations funded her early trips; later, she self-funded the work by leading numerous tours to the Koprivshtitsa folk festival.

She published a biography of one of her main contacts, singer Linka Gergova, in both English and Bulgarian in 1996, with an accompanying CD of Linka's songs. She released several compilations of field recordings, and donated raw materials to the American Folklife Center at the U.S. Library of Congress and to other academic archives. She served for decades as Secretary-Treasurer of the Bulgarian Studies Association (BSA). Organizations as varied as the BSA, the (U.S.) National Folk Organization, Bulgaria's national television and radio platforms, and academic journals have honored her work with lifetime achievement awards and coverage exploring her body of work.

Martha was born in 1940 in Dayton, Ohio to Harry Schecter and Gertrude (Baker) Schecter. They moved seven years later to Massachusetts, which Martha would call home for the rest of her life. Her interest in music and folklore grew organically throughout her life. Harry was a physicist with a keen interest in acoustics and a love for all kinds of music, and Gertrude taught weaving. Martha joined an adult choir, the Lexington Choral Society, at age 12. She continued with the choir into her time at Radcliffe College where, in the early 1960s, she delighted in the rich American folk music tradition that took hold in nearby Harvard Square. She was first exposed to Bulgarian music through an elective course at Radcliffe. She earned degrees in Slavic Languages and Literature at Radcliffe and the University of California.

Returning to Massachusetts after graduate school, Martha continued to explore Eastern European folklore in the burgeoning international folkdancing community cultivated by friends Marianne and Conny Taylor. This community would become central to her most important life events. She met Jon "Jonni" Boudreau through folkdancing, and after several years they conceived a son, Peter. She began this chapter as a single mother, but took great pride in seeing Peter meet Jonni and his family in 1980 and form lasting bonds, and in renewing her own connection with Jonni in later years. She met Dick, also through folkdancing, and they were married in 1976. Dick adopted Peter, and delighted in supporting Martha's interests with his own technical innovations.

Martha enjoyed numerous hobbies, crafts, and occupations. She taught Russian at M.I.T., made leather shoes for customers with various unusual footwear needs, made Appalachian dulcimers, learned and practiced Bulgarian crafts such as card weaving and crocheted beadwork, and put her research into practice as a founding member of the Bulgarian folk music ensemble Zdravets, which decades later continues to host regular dance events for a dedicated community of dancers and music lovers.

Community was a theme common to all her endeavors. She and Dick devoted energy to helping members of their community even when they didn't already know them well. They assisted a number of Bulgarians who immigrated to the United States during and after the fall of the Soviet empire, in some cases providing help that opened life-altering possibilities.

Martha's life was full of delightful contradictions. She described herself as "all three of the original computer-haters," but her esoteric interests and do-it-yourself inclinations drove her to push computers to their limits to get them to do what she needed. She disliked politics, but her personal connections, deep specialized knowledge, and above all her dislike of injustice often eclipsed that preference, and drove her to engage in interesting and impactful ways.

She embraced the social and educational opportunities that technology brought. Her field research continually brought technical challenges, often deriving from the need for durable, high quality recording equipment in remote locations. Dick brought many ideas, and Martha was always an active partner in implementing them. For many years she produced the Folk Arts Center of New England's Folk News, primarily through manual layout and printing, but gradually incorporating elements of desktop publishing. She sustained friendships and passions through social media. At Peter's suggestion, she contributed her knowledge to the English and Bulgarian language editions of Wikipedia. With Dick's guidance, she developed websites of her own to document her expanding knowledge.

Advancing age, medical adventures including two bouts of cancer, the loss of her husband and parents, the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a far-off mass shooting that impacted her family all took their toll, but none diminished her will to try new things and new ways to engage with the world. She embraced hula hooping. She mastered desktop publishing software in order to edit the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston's newsletter. She took on major renovations to the house, overseeing the installation of solar panels, new electrical wiring, and new insulation in recent years. This year she visited a beloved place by the ocean with Peter and his partner Laura, hiking miles through a nature preserve on a blustery January day. Until her final months, she routinely walked to a neighborhood store for her groceries.

Martha remained active, creative, and loving until the end. She developed her first alarming symptoms in August 2023, and received the cancer diagnosis in early September. Though her final weeks were far fewer than she wanted, she had the focus to ensure that her most important unfinished tasks were going to be addressed, and she settled into a beautiful time of visits with friends and loved ones, in person and on the phone. Her clear decision upon hearing the bad news was that "we're going to have fun when we can." She fully realized that vision, and true to form, she brought as many of her friends and family along for the ride as she could manage.

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Published on 2 Comments on Frogs? Frogs!!!

But Martha, it's too silly to write about frogs!  Or is it?  Isn't a Blog a place where you can write about anything you please?

Nedélino, just north of Zlatográd and the Greek border, south central Bulgaria

Recently I had occasion to hear some spring peepers, which I dearly miss, since I can't hear any where I'm now living (not close enough to a wetland, I guess).  And it reminded me that at some point I had made a recording of frogs in the river, singing (at night) in Nedélino (Недéлино), 12 km. north of Zlatográd (Златогрáд) — but when was that???  Thank goodness for all the time I've spent organizing and indexing my work: it didn't take very long to find those two minutes of tape, recorded in May of 2001.  Listen and sink into the active stillness (notice how much traffic noise there isn't?), and below the recording I'll put a few pictures of beautiful Nedelino.

Night frogs in Nedélino, May 2001

(By the way, several people have mentioned hearing a bird.  I hear that too, but as far as I remember this recording was made quite late in the evening. But...they do have nightingales in Bulgaria, so maybe that's what it is?)

Panorama of Nedelino, taken in 2004

We were staying at the north end of town, where the houses disappear into the mountains.  Click on the thumbnails below to see a larger image.  (I wish I could make a more sensitive array of pictures, but haven't figured out how to do it here.)

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Published on 2 Comments on “The young people can’t sing that way!” (….can they??)

Here is a story that seems particularly appropriate right now.  It comes in several parts:

Dolen, Blagoevgrad region

Part 1 happened in the winter of 1980-81, when, together with Dick and Peter, we wanted to visit the village of Dólen (some 17 miles east of Gótse Délčev), because we knew there was a very special kind of singing done only there, and in the neighboring town of Satóvča.  One of the things we learned is that there is some pretty fierce rivalry between the towns as to who stole it from whom! but that is not part of this story.

The first thing that happened, when we arrived in Dólen on a wet and icy 14th of January (the roads were closed later in the day, so we felt lucky to even get there), was that the ensemble director Silvéta Mánčeva greeted us, but told us that the women didn't want to come.  They'd promised to come when she'd asked them the day before, but today it was so icy that they did not want to come out at all....  So she went to try to round them up.  We waited in the warm Cultural Center (I still remember watching steam rising from our wet coats and jackets as they warmed up from the heat of the stove).  And they did come!  But before I go any further, let's listen to an example of this kind of singing:

Слага се слънце, надведа (Slága se slântse, nadvéda), recorded in Dólen (near Satóvča) in the winter of 1980-81  (song texts at end of post)

When we recorded this, all of the singers insisted that none of the young people in the village could do this "high singing (na visóko)"; even Silvéta herself, born in 1947) could not do it.  "It takes a special voice."

I was lucky enough to be able to record several examples of just the "high singing", without the lower part, which stood me in good stead later.  Here is a little sample:

Лесни се, горо (Lesní se, goro), recorded in Dólen


Part 2
After I came home in 1981 with my treasure (about 75 hours of village singing and discussion — almost 900 songs, including a few instrumental melodies!), I gradually started to assemble some "favorites" — songs I especially liked, good songs for sharing, songs that I thought local singers might like to learn...  Among these was "Slaga se, Slântse" (above).

So, sometime after 1985 I sang for awhile with one of Boston's earliest ensembles that did Bulgarian music, Evo Nas.  We singers decided to try and see if we could do this na visóko singing.  To our considerable amazement, we found that once we wrapped our heads around the notes we were trying to sing, and took that "leap of faith"....IT JUST FLEW!  I think we were sitting on my livingroom couch when that happened the first time.

After another year or two Evo Nas folded (too many members had moved away, but by 1989 a couple of us die-hards had formed the ensemble Zdravets, which is still going strong in the Boston area — and the singers continue to sing this song to this day.

Part 3
Moving on to the summer of 1988, I was in Bulgaria on another recording expedition for three months, during several weeks of which my husband Dick, my son Peter, and my long-time singing partner Erica Zissman joined me.  We were offered the services of a car and a driver for a few days, and decided that one of the places we would like to go was Dólen.  We cherished the hope that we could get the na visóko singers to come — even if only for a few minutes — to listen to our na visóko singing and tell us if we were doing it "right".  We arrived in the village just about 6pm, which is a TERRIBLE time for village women - at that time of day their flocks are coming home from pasture and need to be greeted, milked, and bedded down for the night.  But we found Silvéta, and asked nicely, and once again, she managed  to round up four of the women who did this singing.  Interestingly enough, Erica and I found that we could not sing with them, because in the eight years since I had recorded them, there were tiny changes in timing and possibly even pitches.  But what do you know?  If they sang, and we answered them (in the traditional style)...  it worked just fine!  But at that time young people in their own village still could not do it.

Part 4
Fast forward to the summer of 1991, when the big national folk festival was held in Koprívštitsa.  (Dick and I led a tour, and nearly all of Zdravets came, but again — that is another story.)  We narrowly missed the performance of the group from Dólen, but caught up with them afterwards, and they sang a little for us.  Who sang?  Who sang na visóko?  Everyone — the older women, the younger women, I think there were kids there who sang — and Silvéta sang!  I guess that if two crazy Americans (of all things) could learn to sing this way....!

Coda
Unfortunately there are two sad parts to the coda.  One is that by 2010, when on a later tour we stopped again in Dólen, there was no singing group there anymore, though there was a strong one in Satóvča, who sang for us, and persuaded me to do some singing with them (I had no partner on that tour, though).

The other sad part is that my dear friend Erica, with whom I started singing in 1971, succumbed to a cancer she had been fighting for six years, at the end of February.  The tiny sliver of silver lining is that Zdravets had sung this song in a coffeehouse two days before she died, and I had shared this story — and I did manage to visit Erica the day before she died, and remind her of this adventure.  We shared a moment of gratitude for the way our lives were intertwined.

Erica Zissman (1951-2018)

Song texts:

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Published on 3 Comments on Турското циганче (The Little Turkish Roma child)

Here is a little story I heard in the village of Govedártsi, south-west of Sámokov, Bulgaria, in 1988.  I've been saving it, but I think the time has come to share it:

tursko-ciganshe-mapDobrínka Spásova Kalpáčka was born on the 28th of November 1918 in the village of Raduíl, some 20 kilometers to the south-east of Sámokov. I met her on the afternoon of August 2, 1988, in Govedártsi, a village about the same distance from Sámokov but to the south-west.

This was a bright sunny afternoon relatively early in my two-month stay in Govedártsi (I had a Fulbright grant to do in-depth research into old songs in four villages in the Sámokov region) and I was a bit at loose ends. I thought I’d look for a woman I'd met and recorded a few days earlier—we had found her out tending her cow and she told me some pretty interesting songs, and said she was usually at home in the afternoon. So I had knocked at her door, but, finding no one about, I started down the road, hoping to find someone who knew where she was. But it was noontime, and no one but me seemed to be out and about. Soon I came upon a little grassy patch with a woman sitting in the midst of it in a little patch of shade. Her legs were stretched out straight in front of her the way village women sit (you can see this in the picture at the end of this post), her shoes were off, and she was crocheting. She looked up, and I asked her if she had seen Tina. “No,” she replied, “what do you need her for?” I mumbled something incoherent about looking for old songs, and she said, “Oh, I can tell you one....”

Dobrinka Spasova Kalpačka

Thus began a delightful session which I remember with great pleasure to this day. My new-found friend was Elénka Ilíeva Mírčeva, herself born in 1921 in the village of Govedártsi. We chatted for a few moments, and her friend Dobrínka walked by. “Dobrinka, come on over here!” she hailed her. Dobrínka replied something that I couldn’t catch, and her friend repeated, “Come over her and we’ll tell the young wife some songs”—and she turned to me to confirm: “Are you married?” When I assured her that I was a married lady, she launched into the song about Krali Marko and Filip Madžárin (not one that, by my lights, would be inappropriate to tell a maiden, but perhaps she was just checking). Dobrinka helped her out a bit, and then it was Dobrinka’s turn. Before she began, I asked the routine information: her full name, when and where she was born. When she mentioned the village of Raduíl, I told her that I had recorded there several years ago. She was excited about this, said I must have recorded her cousins (I could not at the time remember their names, but later checking proved her right). Then I asked her how long she had lived in Govedartsi....

“My father was killed in the war in 1918, and I was born after that, three months later. My mother had been pregnant, and she had me three months after he was killed. After that–my mother came here, she married someone from Govedártsi, and she brought me here when I was eight months old. Trouble was, the people here didn’t want me, and they sent me back. So I lived with my grandmother and my uncles in Raduíl. And—but when I was born, my mother didn’t want to nurse me. She wanted me to die. Y’ know, a child with no father, you know how much that costs. And her breasts got infected. They started to hurt. OK, but it wasn’t like it is now, there wasn’t anything you could buy to feed a baby. And so I was hungry, and I cried and cried, and somebody said to my grandmother, ‘Maria, there’s this Turkish Roma woman nearby, she has a little one. Go talk to her, let her nurse yours too, so the baby can go to sleep, and stop crying.’ And my grandmother went to see that Turkish Roma woman. ‘Selíma,’ she said, ‘would you be willing to come and nurse our baby too, such-and-such happened, its mother is sick and can’t nurse it and we don’t know what to do–she’s very tiny.’ And Selíma, granny Selíma, said, ‘OK, I’ll come. Granny Maria, I’ll come and nurse it.’ So for two whole months a Turkish Roma woman nursed me.”

“Wow!” exclaimed her friend Elenka.

“Two whole months.”

“That means you have Turkish—blood— ”

“Oh, I’ve got Roma in me too,” affirmed Dobrinka.

The thing that struck me at this point was Elenka’s reaction. Clearly the women were good friends—neighbors, as I later learned, and indeed close friends—but from everything I could tell (short of “breaking” the mood by intruding my own questions) Elenka was hearing this piece of information about her friend for the first time. She spoke almost with a sense of wonder, that Dobrinka had “Turkish ‘blood’” in her veins from being nursed as an infant by a Turkish Roma woman.

“Turkish Roma,” continued Dobrinka. “Yes! Well, after awhile my mother’s breasts got better, and— And then she re-married, and she brought me here [to this village]. Well, that was fine, but they didn’t want to have to raise me, here, and they sent me back. OK, but then in ’23 they killed two of my uncles. Both at the same time. And the other two—well, they worried them—you know how they worry people like that. So I went to school there, first and second grade, and then when I was ready to go into third grade my grandmother died, and I[??? something unclear] back here. And that’s the way my life—”

By this time my own mouth was hanging open. With such a story I would sooner have expected a hardened, embittered person—but the woman who sat with us on the grass seemed to be graced with one of the gentlest, most generous souls I have ever encountered, an impression which did not change as I saw her in later years, on other occasions.

“But,” she continued, “wait, let me tell you something else, Elenka! One year we were in Velingrad [a beautiful spa town on the other side of the Rila mountain range] on vacation with the child [presumably her grandchild], I had Sašo with me.”

“Oh yes, tell the young lady!” urged Elenka. (She seemed to know this story, but later she reacted to it as if hearing it for the first time.)

“I’ll tell it. I took Sašo—he was only this big (she shows me how tall he was), we were on vacation together. OK, but the place where we got our food was a little distance away from where we were sleeping—about as far as to the little square down there [down the hill from where we were sitting]. One morning we were headed down for breakfast. Everybody had gone on ahead, and I was waiting for the child—he was playing with this ‘n’ that. And I was standing there by the road waiting for him, and as I looked down below the road I saw some Roma picking camomile. And all of a sudden one of them, big as my husband here [husband Spas had joined us by that time], he was a little closer to us, and he jumped over the gully by the side of the road and came up to me. Right up onto the road. And he says to me, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘From Govedartsi,’ I said, ‘and where are you from?’ ‘I’m from Bratánitsa, near Pázardžik,’ he says, ‘but I was born in Raduil. Aren’t you—my mother’s told me that she nursed a little Bulgarian with my milk?’”

“Good Lord!” exclaims Elenka, and we both gasp.

“Well, if you would believe it,” continued Dobrinka, “I felt as if the ground had just fallen out from under me, and then came back. What a thing—just imagine, what a coincidence, to run into your brother like that! So we stood and talked for quite awhile, and—and to this day I’m angry, it just didn’t occur to me to get that boy’s address.”

In 1989 I saw Dobrinka and her husband again, and she told me the story again.  At the end of that conversation, I asked how the Roma man had recognized her?  (I had secretly wondered if they might have seen each other occasionally as they grew up.)  But both Dobrinka and Spas said definitively that it was a "completely chance" meeting, and he did not know or "recognize" her.  It just turned out that way.  I wish I had a picture of him too!

Dobrinka, Elenka & Spas, Govedartsi

For the die-hards who would like to hear this conversation, I'll put it here—but I don't really expect many people to listen to it!

P.S.:
Later that afternoon, Elenka told Dobrinka how I had visited the village two summers before (with my husband and son) and had gone up into the field where a group of women were haying—another magical occasion. The women had sung, and we had recorded, and Elenka had recognized me from then, although she didn’t let on right away.

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Published on 2 Comments on Where has Martha been lately?

No new posts for what seems like ages....  No, I did not fall off the face of the earth, or get lost in a Slough of Despond (though I've spent some time there), or decide to quit blogging — or even taken off for Parts Unknown.  I've been caught in a tangled web of my own making!  The thumbnail version is something like this:

Some of you know that my archive of recordings is already partially in the American Folklife Collection at the Library of Congress.  But about half of it is still here at home, because I have to finish digitizing it (so I have copies) before I can send it.  AND...the part that's there is, I would say, virtually inaccessible, because if you look at that page, you will see only the most general information about "what it is":

  • 104 sound cassettes : analog.
  • 4 sound discs (CD-R) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.
  • manuscripts 1 box (11 folders)

Huh?  You, looking at that, might ask, "What's IN those 104 sound cassettes, and how can I find out enough about it to know if there's anything there that might be of interest to me?"

The information about it is actually all very thoroughly documented in the "box of manuscripts", and probably also on one or two of the CD-R's — but how would you know that, or know how to access them?  So I've recently been in contact with the folks at Library of Congress, and as a result of that correspondence, I've been copying all my digitized files onto a small drive to send to them, AND....getting the primary documentation (the "track-by-track" one) transliterated into Latin script, so you can read "Zatvoren Gergin založen" instead of "Затворен Гергин заложен"!  You still might not be able to understand it, but at least you can read and copy the letters!  (And then, accordingly, I will have to do some re-alphabetizing, because З comes early in the Cyrillic alphabet, whereas Z is at the end of the Latin alphabet!)  So many details, so little time.  Once I've done all that and sent them the drive, I hope they will find a way to put enough of it into the record that a human being who just happens to learn about it, but doesn't know me from Adam, can have a clue.

MF 1988 tapes
MF 1988 tapes

And...of course, in the process I have turned up a @#$%-load o' little problems, or at least questions.  Like: since taking them the tapes I took them in 2006, I have photographed the actual cassettes, etc. that I still have at home, so that I have a visual record of what I have as well as the text record that, Martha being after all Martha, varies from trip to trip, and at minimum tends to get pretty complex.  The 1988 material (that I'm now finishing up digitizing) looks like this:

But I didn't take pictures like that for the material I gave them in 2006, included in which are a couple of tapes I didn't intend to give them, because they're copies of material someone else gave to me.  BUT, I can find some of those at home, but not all.  So what DID I actually send them???  Well, my contact there has kindly sent someone to photocopy the physical tapes I did send, and now (after a week and a half of wondering) I do know.

And exactly what paperwork documentation did I send them?  I kept notes, that I thought were "definitive", but 10 years later, those definitive things can become highly debatable!  Then there are little details in my documentation, which (having been done over a period of 35 years or so) is not the same for each trip.  I won't even attempt to go into that, because I'd be sitting here all day writing, and you'd have stopped reading!

Anyway, this post is to let you know that I've finally gotten that situation roughly under control and definitely underway, so I can come back to writing about the fun part: writing about the material.  I even came up with the song for my next "real" post while doing this paperwork stuff, so I hope to get that out soon.

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Published on 5 Comments on Emergency in the field!

Many kinds of emergencies can happen when one is working in the field - being struck by lightning, having a baby, having a grandchild break an arm or a leg coming down off a pile of hay (this doesn't happen to the 60- and 70-year-olds who have spent their lives doing this, but it does happen to their city-raised grandchildren who come to visit in the summer).  Then there was the evening when I saw a friend come home from a day's haying carrying a broken pitchfork [picture].  "What happened?" I asked.  "Oh, I'm strong, I broke it!"

My own emergency was of quite a different nature.  In 1980 I went to Bulgaria planning to traipse around to as many villages in the south-western part of the country as I could in three months, recording old songs from (mostly) old ladies with a brand-new Sony cassette recorder.  My husband Dick and our son Peter came with me for half the time.  Dick had selected the recorder (a new model, very high-quality but small enough and light enough not to be a burden to carry).  At the time his profession was repairing audio equipment, so he brought along a small selection of tools in case he needed them: needle-nosed pliers, a small soldering-iron and some solder, screwdrivers, a bottle of nail polish.... After a few weeks we began to notice that the machine was not making very good recordings. Inspecting it yielded no clues.  For awhile we thought maybe the cold weather was causing the problem, so we would carry it inside our jackets to keep it warm.  But it continued to get worse, not better.  When we found ourselves in Blagóevgrad, or guide suggested we visit the local radio station, where Dick could use some of their test instruments.  There was a power outage...but they had their own emergency generator, so he was able to work on it.  But he just couldn't figure out what needed fixing!

Gotse Delchev, Jan 1981
Looking out over Gótse Délčev from our hotel window in the winter of 1980-81

We continued south to the beautiful town of Gótse Délčev, where someone loaned us a machine of lesser quality as a stop-gap measure.  Finally, one afternoon Dick sent Peter and me out for a walk while he worked on it.  When we came back, we found him literally in tears.  Why?  Well, he had realized what the problem was: within the first 30 hours of using this brand-new machine, the record/play head (the soul of the machine that makes the recordings and also plays them back) had...worn out!!!

Now what?

Gótse Délčev, Blagóevgrad region, Bulgaria
Gótse Délčev, Blagóevgrad region

Well, since I was officially a participant in the scholarly exchange program with Bulgaria, I was entitled to help from someone at the US Embassy, so we braved the wilds of placing a telephone call—which in those days was not a trivial matter.  Fortunately we were able to do it from our hotel (rather than going to the Post Office).  We were able to reach my contact, and he asked me where we were.  "In Gótse Délčev," I said.  There was a pause, and I don't think I will ever forget his reply.  "Well," he said thoughtfully, I know who HE is [one of the partisans at the turn of the 20th century, see Gotse Delchev], but I don't know where you are."

We worked my location out and, probably because we were near Greece at the time, his first thought was that maybe we could get a part in Greece.  (Leave Bulgaria and come back?  Really??!  Visas, transportation, all that stuff?!)  But it turned out they did not have the part in the store he was thinking of in Solun (Thessaloniki).

So, quite down-hearted, we wended our way back to Sofia, because Dick and Peter were scheduled to leave Bulgaria in a few days, leaving me there to do another month and a half of research with an inadequate tape recorder.  (In those days you brought absolutely EVERYTHING you might need with you when you went to Bulgaria—down to the kleenex and paperclips.)  I must have called my friend Vergíli Atanásov, a scholar of musical instruments who had technical knowledge.  Wonder of wonders: he had a spare head for a Teac machine that he didn't need right then, which he offered to give me!  Further wonder of wonders: it fit my machine! but Dick didn't have everything he needed in order to install it.  I was able to produce a little nail file that would do, but we needed Epoxy, or something like that.  Which it turned out that our friend Lauren Brody, who just happened to be in Bulgaria at the time, just happened to have.

Armed with my nail file, his soldering iron, and Lauren's epoxy, Dick sat down to work on the tape recorder, sending Peter and me off to Bístritsa where there was a huge celebration scheduled in honor of Bábinden—Midwives' Day, when new mothers visited the midwife who had delivered their baby that year, to the tune of raucous and ribald merry-making, ending in a trip to the river where the young men dragged the midwives into the river (this was January...) and everybody got wet....

Babinden in Bistritsa,
Bábinden in Bístritsa, 21 January 1981

We had a great time watching the formal presentation, then went down the road to watch the fun by the river from a good vantage-point, and later caought  a lovely off-guard photo of the Bístritsa bábi (grannies) in the town square, where the journalists and photographers were lining them up for a formal photo-shoot.

The Bístritsa Babi (Grannies), 27 Jan 1981
The Bístritsa Babi (Grannies), 21 Jan 1981

And came back to our hotel room, biting our fingernails.  As we walked into the room, we heard the tape-recorder playing: Dick had pulled off his repair!

The next day, Dick and Peter returned to the US, leaving me in Bulgaria till the end of February with a now-working tape recorder.

There is a small sequel to this story.  After I returned in 1981, we contacted Sony about our problem.  They tried to blame the tapes we were using (not a major brand), but we told them we used those tapes in all the tape recorders we have as well as at the place Dick worked, with no such problem.  They replaced the head; the new one wore out also.  The machine is still working with Vergili's Teac head!

 

I have to laugh...was writing to an old friend this morning, describing some of my process of putting together this blog (and my plans for the Archive database that needs to be created, with all my stuff in it, in a way easy to access....and that I really don't yet know how to go about that) and was reminded of my mother—who at a time like this would remind me that I've always been "DEE-ter-minded" (which is how she said I used to pronounce "determined")!

DEE-ter-minded Martha posted texts & translations for the two songs in the previous post, today, 13 Feb.