When and where recorded – Martha Forsyth * Bulgarian village singing

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

sunnywheel8192March 20, 2018October 30, 20212 Comments

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

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.

Song texts:

Family tragedies, 1 6

sunnywheel8192April 17, 2017October 30, 20216 Comments

Today I was amused to see this update to a news item:

I'd been noticing this item for several days, and every time I did, I found myself thinking, "Hmmm....have they been listening to old Bulgarian songs?" So today I want to share with you a song about Jánko and Janínko. But first, I'd like to point out that anyone who gets involved with Bulgarian folklore will sooner or later bump into the 500 years of "Turkish slavery", when Bulgaia was ruled by Turks. If you're dim on this important piece of history, check it out online. The Wikipedia article on Ottoman Bulgaria is a good place to start.

So, as you can imagine, a lot of terrible, tragic things happened to individuals and to families in that time. One that is well-represented in the Bulgarian song repertoire is exactly our "song of the day", the one about Jánko and Janínko. I just went searching through my lists to see when and where I've recorded it; I see that I have more than 20 versions of it (and counting)—plus an additional song I recorded in Bistritsa, that may be yet another version, or it might be an offshoot that developed in a somewhat different direction.

In other words, this is a very powerful story, that village people remember. I guess it all goes to show that "there's nothing new under the sun"! though I'd like to point out that most likely this Bulgarian song originated not in someone's fancy (like the news item), but in response to a real event.

Jambórano (now part of Dragovíštitsa), Kjustendíl region

Here is a nicely-sung version, which I see that I already gave you early last year, but I will re-post here, with its beautifuland haunting Samokovsko "harvest song melody":

К вечерум се робье продавая (K večerum se rob'je prodavaja), recorded in Kovačévtsi, Samokov region.

You can find the text and translation for this version in my post from February 2016, "Harvest songs...Part 1".

Eléna Nikólova Božílova, Béli Ískâr 1988 (click on the picture to see it larger)

But, to give you something new this time, here is a version that I recorded three years later in Béli Ískâr, also Sámokov region, from Eléna Nikólova Božílova, born in 1931. Elena has given me many magnificent versions of songs, and I consider this the granddaddy of this song. It is a good example of the way a consummate singer can breathe life into a story-line. Here are two pdf files, one with the original Bulgarian text, and one with a translation.

Now, I know that if you read the translation carefully, you're going to wonder about some peculiar, even illogical, things about the plot. This was only the second song she gave me, and I don't think she'd yet gotten over her shock at meeting me. You see, I had met her husband in the village square, and he took me to their home, certain that we would find her there. But no....she was nowhere to be found. He went out to look for her, leaving me alone in the house. It was a warm day and I started feeling a bit drowsy, so I lay down to rest a bit, when....Elenka walked in! She had NOT met her husband before coming home, she just walked in and found a total stranger lying down in her house! and she seemed pretty cross. I tried to explain calmly why I was there and what had happened, and she gradually relaxed. In the end she became quite friendly to me—you can see this in her smile here, but that took a little while. She gave me 21 fine songs, and when I saw her again in 1994 and she told me more than 30 more!

Турското циганче (The Little Turkish Roma child) 3

sunnywheel8192September 18, 2016October 30, 20213 Comments

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:

Dobrínka 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....”

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!

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.

Harvest songs…Part 2 4

sunnywheel8192July 30, 2016October 30, 20214 Comments

Back in February I posted five of the melodies used by different villages in their solo harvest songs—but could not at the time find a recording that I had made of the haunting melody used in Bístritsa (a village in greater Sofia, on the slopes of Vítoša Mountain). (I didn't feel right about publishing someone else's recording, but I couldn't find my own at the time.)

It turned up recently, in a rather interesting way: I've been compiling a master list of all the places I have recorded, with dates and tape numbers, number of songs I recorded, and just a little information about who I recorded. In thinking about my recordings in said Bistritsa in the spring of 1985, I remembered that my first recording session in the village that year was on a day when I stopped by to see Dánče (Dana Ovnarska), then the youngest member of the group. It just happened that Ménka Arónova was visiting her at the time, so after having a bite of lunch, the two of them did some singing for me. I didn't remember what we'd recorded that day, but I did have a dim memory of having later studied very closely a recording of Ménka and "someone else" singing that song, working very hard to reproduce the vocal ornaments that they were using. "Aha," I said, "maybe they did the solo harvest melody that day!" And it turned out to be exactly the recording I'd been looking for!

Ménka and Dánče singing for me in Danče's kitchen, 9 March 1985 — Ménka Arónova and Dánče Ovnárska singing for me in Danče's kitchen, 9 March 1985

От пладне се мома провикнала (Ót pladne se momá proviknála), recorded in ‏ Bístritsa, Sofia region.

Pánka demonstrating reaping with sickle and palamárka

At the end of the song I left our discussion for you to hear. It's a rather juicy song, this one! They tell me that they used to sing this song right after they got up from their noontime rest to start reaping again. These solo harvest songs were sung while they were bent over reaping (one woman singing, another answering with the same words). (Try singing this way some time....it's amazing how the position almost seems to pull the voice out of you!) Were the singers working close to each other? "Ah! They might be, but they also might be far apart" —and Dánče told me how she would sing with her aunt, the aunt working and singing in her own field, and Danče answering as she worked in hers!

Song text:

От пладне се мома провикнала—
да би защо, моме, за низащо!
Ке промина една лудо младо,
ке промина, мирно не замина,
на везело моми свилна китка.
Викна мома, викна колку може:
"Де сте да сте, мои девет брайкя,
де сте да сте сега тука да сте,
да фанете младо неженето!
Ни го бийте, ни младо губете—
при мене го вързан докарайте,
да го тури мома вечна мъка,
летен дено под зелена сенкя,
зимен дено ю 'ладна одея,
да седне мома срещу него,
да го гори мома с църни очи,
да го бие мома с бели ръце,
да го петни мома с медни уста."

After noon a young girl cried out—
as if she had a reason, but she had none!
Because a crazy young lad had come by,
had come by and had not passed on peacefully
but had snatched her bouquet of jasmine.
The girl cried out with all her might:
“Wherever you are, my nine brothers,
wherever you are, come quick!
Come and catch that young bachelor!
Don’t beat him, don’t judge him—
just tie that young fellow up and bring him to me
so I can torment him forever—
in the summertime in the green shade,
in the wintertime in the cool house.
I’ll sit opposite him
and burn him with my black eyes,
I’ll beat him with my fair arms
and bruise him with my honey lips!”

Are the songs beautiful?

sunnywheel8192May 3, 2016October 30, 2021Leave a comment

In going through my material lately, I came across a song to whose file-name I had added simply the word "WOW". Hmm, which one is that? So I played it, to see what had impressed me. Sure enough, it's well worth a post.

Bg map-Screenshot, Lozen — Lózen, Sófia region

Contrary to usual practice, though, I'm going to hold the song till I've talked about it a bit, because I think you'll get a lot more out of it after I tell you something about why I think it's so special. I recorded the song in what was in 1980 the village of Górni Lózen. Now there is only one town, Lózen, but in 1980 there was a little bit of a break in the houses between Dólni (Lower) and Górni (upper) Lózen.

The song, which the women said they used to sing when they started gathering (after the harvest was in) to spin, tells a very familiar story:

Two dragons are fighting in the mountains, from them flows a river that flows past Sofia to a dark dungeon. No one is in the dungeon but the prisoner Gjúro, with a grey falcon on his arm. He feeds the falcon with bits of his fingers, sheds tears to give him water, combs his hair to make a nest for the falcon. The falcon asks why he is feeding him so well: "Are you planning to send me far away, or are you planning to use me in battle?" Gjúro is not planning to do battle. What he wants is to send the falcon to his home to see what's going on there. The falcon has already been to his home, he says: "The yard is all overgrown with weeds, and in the weeds there is a dead tree. On the tree sit three cuckoos. One of them is your mother, calling you to breakfast; the second is your sister, calling you to dinner; the third is your wife, calling you to bed."

But now, listen to how they sing it! The two parts barely diverge from each other...one part goes up a little while the other goes down a little, then they converge again—repeating this a few times to give the "melody":

Два се змея на планина бият (Dvá se zméja na planína bíjat), recorded in Górni Lózen, Sófia region, 1980

Listen closely, though, and you'll hear something fascinating! There's really a lot of subtle detail in this very minimalist song. The two groups sing different intervals: when the lead singer in the first group goes up to her higher note (which happens a number of times in each verse), at the beginning of the verse she goes up only a little bit (a half-tone), but later she goes up noticeably higher, even a full tone! But the lead singer in the second group goes consistently to the same interval (only a half-tone). Does this bother anybody? Not a bit, as long as you are used to singing with the lead singer you're singing with! Criss-cross the groupings of singers, though, and you'll get consternation and sometimes (when I first heard this I didn't really believe it, but it's true) COUGHING! There's really a very physical component to this singing...

So, is this song "wow" because it is beautiful? Yes, and no. Personally, I find the minimal melody to be very compelling (incidentally, such melodies are considered to be among the most ancient). And that subtle variation between the two groups of singers fascinates me (Try to sing it, and you'll see just how fascinating it really is!)

Those who know Bulgarian and might find it interesting to listen to the discussion that precedes the song, in which one of the women gives the whole text, complete with commentary (they only sing part of it, though). And here is the full Bulgarian text (in my somewhat messy hand-writing!)

Emergency in the field! 5

sunnywheel8192February 29, 2016October 28, 20215 Comments

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!

Harvest songs…Part 1 1

sunnywheel8192February 23, 2016October 30, 20211 Comment

Getting together this post, which I thought was going to be simple ("Just put up some nice songs"...), has taken me a good week! There is SO much more to say about each of these songs, and pictures to show, and customs to explain...as well as all of the music, texts, and maps to gather. I hope I've learned my lesson and will try to present more limited posts from now on!

This is a HUGE topic, which I am going to have to break into manageable chunks...

One of the things I was specifically looking for, when I went to Bulgaria in the winter of 1980-81, was harvest songs (which became generalized to include ALL field-work). Even though it was winter, I recorded over 100 of these songs! And of course, on my other trips I have similarly recorded a great many, especially in the summer of 1988, when I was there from July through early October.

Everywhere I went, I found that some of these songs were sung solo (or by two voices singing in unison), others were sung with a drone. In each case, a second person/group to sing would repeat each verse, singing the same words sung by the first group. In the process of recording these, I learned that a great many of these songs had very precise times when they were sung, at the time when the tradition was strong. I also learned that for the achingly-beautiful solo harvest songs, each village has its own melody (sometimes more than one, but often only one) to which they were sung.

Another time I'll talk more about which songs are sung when, which are solo/which are group, and all that - but first, I think I will pamper myself and offer you some of the solo harvest songs whose melodies I particularly love. So, without further ado, bathe yourself in these songs! Texts will be at the end, as usual.

Бегала Янка (Begála Jánka), recorded in ‏ Čérna gorá, Pérnik region. For me, this melody has a feeling of immense space ....as if I see, stretching out in front of me, a huge field that we're going to be working in all day!

I wanted to put Bístritsa's beautiful harvest melody here, but could not find a suitable recording when I first posted this. I've found it now, see "Harvest Songs...part II".

Ой Петъре, Петъре юначе (Oj Petâre, Petâre junáče), recorded in Plána, Sofia region. A cautionary tale - read the translation! Plána is not far from Kovačévtsi, you can hear a similarity in the melodies.

К вечерум се робье продавая (K večerum se rob'je prodavaja), recorded in Kovačévtsi, Samokov region. The theme of children separated at a young age, whose lives cross again later in life, is very widespread.

Облагала се Драгана (Oblagála se Dragána), recorded in Jambórano (now part of Dragovíštitsa), Kjustendíl region. A beautiful melody with a terrifying text, if you get all the way to the end.

Карай, Райо! (Karaj, Raja!), recorded in Vladája, a suburb to the south-west of Sofia. Before singing, Kúna explains that this song is sung towards evening, when the girls are hurrying to finish the field.

Song texts:

Pojde Petâr na raj Bozhi

K večerum se robje prodavaja, pdf

Oblag ála se Dragána

So what IS that rhythm??? 7

sunnywheel8192February 12, 2016October 30, 20217 Comments

Now, I'm pretty good at catching on to the rhythms used in Bulgarian music—having danced for many years certainly helps, but even before that I understood music, including rhythms, pretty well.

But sometimes the rhythm is really—well, "blurry" is the word that comes to mind, indistinct. It's there, but it's not very sharply executed. This happens particularly when the singers are sitting still while they are singing, not dancing. On my 1980-81 field trip I encountered such a song. This was in the town of Íhtiman (south-east of Sófia, on the way to Plóvdiv), where I recorded a group of women born in Belítsa (a tiny village about 10 km. to the north-east) but married into, and living in, Íhtiman. Listen to it:

Един Димитър на майкя (Edin Dimitâr na majkja) (see text below)

What do YOU think? (See answer, below second version.) At first it seemed very even, but there was just a little something that left me wondering. I puzzled over this for years, sometimes playing it for our folkdance gurus and asking what they thought, but no one was sure.
Then in 1985 I was able to go back to Ihtiman and meet with the same group of ladies. "What dance do you do to that song?" I asked them. They started singing AND dancing, and immediately the rhythm was obvious, though still not sharply delineated. Listen again, especially you dancers—I think it's clearer when they're dancing while singing:

Един Димитър на майкя (Edin Dimitâr na majkja), sung while actually dancing

Now, after I started writing this post I got cold feet: I wasn't sure if it really is clearer without the visual element, or not. So I asked people to tell me what they thought (see comments below), as a way test my own theory. The general consensus seems to be that neither version is really clear, but the "while dancing" one is a little clearer, if only because there is no pause between verses, as there is in the first version.

The answer?

Thanks to everyone who replied for the interesting discussion. Catherine and Dan nailed it: it's a gánkino! But in fairness to people who gave different answers, the singing does leave itself open to being interpreted as a devetórka. I will add the text, because it really is fun to both sing AND dance this, in the old tradition of "хоро на песен" ('horó na pésen', or 'dance to singing'), where marriageable girls led the dancing until later in the evening when the men with instruments arrived.

If you like these rhythm-puzzles, I have one more I can post that is still un-solved, and many examples of kópanica where the 3rd beat is seriously truncated (sounds like 2+2+2+4, rather than 2+2+3+[2+2]), even when they're singing while dancing.

Song text

Ihtiman 1980:14 Jedin Dimit'r na majkja — Ihtiman 1980:114 Jedin Dimitar na majkja

Come sing for these Americans! 2

sunnywheel8192February 8, 2016November 26, 20212 Comments

Draginovo, Velingrad region, Bulgaria — Dragínovo, Vélingrad region, Bulgaria

5 January 1981—a snowy day in Bulgaria. Three Forsyths (my husband Dick, son Peter, and I), together with our musicologist guide from Sofia, head for the village of Dragínovo, a few kilometers north of Velingrad. We walk across the village square to the Cultural Center, pausing to look at the goat on its hind legs nibbling at the branches of a New Year's tree (despite this being a pómak [Bulgarian Muslim] village), and Peter gets excited about the children sledding behind the building on tiny home-made sleds barely big enough to sit on. (He eventually went out and joined them.)

When we get inside, we are greeted by the mayor and two male singers from the village. These magnificent singers will get a post all of their own some day, but right now I want to tell you about what happened after they had sung us a half-dozen songs. Being a little surprised to have male singers (so far I had recorded only older women), I had somewhat hesitantly asked if there weren't any women singers in the village? Well, hmm...there was going to be some difficulty finding older women for me, but someone went out to look around and see who she could find to sing for me. Back she came, with an 18-year-old girl in tow, whom I will introduce to you here as Ivánka Delsízova, the name she was using when I met her. (More on names below her song.)

Ivánka had been dragged in unceremoniously off the street, plunked down in a room full of strangers (three Americans and a scholar from Sofia), and told to sing for them! She came in somewhat hesitantly and surveyed the scene. Only much later (maybe in 2010) did she tell me how disconcerted she was: she had never seen Americans face-to-face before, nor a man with a beard, and here she was being told to sing for us, all alone! Well, she told me, she snuck a look at the men who'd been singing, whom she knew well, and realized that they looked quite comfortable. So she decided it would probably be OK. She sat down and said nothing for a minute and a half! (I timed it), while she composed herself. Then she sang us a song that lasted for nearly 10 minutes.... Listen to this girl sing!

Либиха са, леле, искале са (Libiha sa, iskale sa)

(See song texts, below.)

Well, needless to say, Ivanka made quite an impression on us. She later took us to her home (the direct way to get there was up over a huge rock outcropping!), and we have kept in contact to this day. Some years later the Bulgarian government allowed their pomak population to take back their original names—hers is Mehréma, but she is better known in the village as Kéra, more precisely "Kéra mláda" (Кера млада), to distinguish her from her mother, who is also called Kera.

I hope to put up many more of the songs I've recorded in Draginovo, but that will take some time.