Early Arabic Sound Recordings and the Public Domain

January 20, 2022 1:49 PM

Harvard's Loeb Music Library is releasing a small subset of their early 20th century Arabic 78 collection. Acquired over many years, the Arabic 78 Collection currently contains nearly 600 cataloged recordings of Arab and Arab-American music spanning the first half of the 20th century, from roughly 1903 through the 1950s, valuable not only for their musical content, but also as artifacts of the early sound recording industry.

Many of the earliest records date to the late Nahda era, a period of “renaissance” in Arab literature and culture. Among the renowned performers represented in the collection are Egyptian singers Yūsuf Al-Manyalāwī (1847-1911), Abd al-Ḥayy Ḥilmī (1857-1912), Salāmah Ḥijāzī (1852-1917), Sayyid Al- Ṣaftī (1875-1939), Munīrah Al-Mahdiyyah (1884-1965) and Sayyid Darwīsh (1892-1923), and instrumentalists such as Sāmī Al-Shawwā (violin, 1889-1965) and Naʻīm Karakand (violin, 1891-1973). Stars such as Umm Kulthūm (1904-1975), Muḥammad ʻAbd al-Wahhāb (1902-1991) and Asmahān (1912-1944) are also represented, alongside less well-known performers like Faraj Allāh Afandī Bayḍā, Aḥmad afandī Al-Mīr, and Zakiyyah Akūb, likely the first woman to record in Arabic in the US.

Loeb Music Library: Arabic 78 Collection on Aviary

posted by Ahmad Khani (6 comments total)

Excited to explore! Thank you!
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:23 PM on January 20, 2022

ooooh, cool! thanks for posting! three MORE cheers for the public domain!
posted by humbug at 3:01 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Fascinating and to be treasured... however, anyone who listens to that with nostalgia for the playback media is deaf.
posted by Bdprtsma at 3:03 PM on January 20, 2022

It hadn't occurred to me that mainstream American record labels back in the 1900s and 1910s would be putting out Arabic music recordings! Anyone who is older can maybe answer this question. How widespread were these records? Could you buy them in your local record shop? Or did people have to hunt and trade for them?
posted by starfishprime at 12:36 AM on January 21, 2022

These records would have been sold in their communities and wouldn't have circulated much further - though back then there weren't yet record shops, as we'd think of them mid-century onward. If I recall, players would have been sold mostly through furniture stores; I expect with a selection of records appropriate for the community.

Ian Nagoski does a lot of wonderful research contextualizing recordings from this era through his label Canary Records. Here's a podcast where he talks about how this kind of recording came about

https://www.ephemeral.show/episode/diaspora

posted by bendybendy at 5:57 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think you have to create an account, and then login and 'request' to listen, which has to be approved by an administrator, FYI. Not sure if anyone else has figured out how to get around that.
posted by knownassociate at 7:44 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]