This is Rumania

This is Rumania
Parliament, PLP 119
New York, 1960

We've seen it all before; when the first word in the subtitle spells "authentic", it's most likely far from it. In the case of This is Rumania it's really not that far but yet far enough. The recordings were probably made in Romania (Rumania, as it used to be spelled) but were not made by the people of the land but by their stars and professionals. It is not folk music as the sleeve claims, but professional entertainment. In comparison with an authentic record (such as Folk Music of Rumania on Folkways, with recordings made by Bela Bartok) we hear some of the same melodies and rhythms but they are orchestrated and arranged. And unlike on the Bela Bartok one, the singers have of course perfect pitch here. As we've seen before too on so many records found in the thrift stores I've been writing about, two of the four solo vocal performers on This is Rumania have the first name Maria. I have quite a collection of singers named Maria, and it grows unproportionally fast. One of the Marias is the singer Maria Tanase, she is not new in my collection, but the other one, Maria Lataretu (1911-1972) I had never heard of before. That is not to say she wasn't a celebrity, she was, she has her own Wikipedia page if may use that as a criterion for famous. Maria Lataretu is the singer on the sample from the record I selected. The title La Vitai La Rasarit is translated on the sleeve as "I was looking eastwards..." and on the label as "I looked to the sunrise".

Sad Song

04 Gloomy Sunday.m4a
http://www.box.net/shared/fng0kve6vxnsne287sad

George Boulanger, King of the Gypsy Violin
Colosseum Records CRLP 200, New York, 1955

Our family home had a painting of a guitar playing gypsy boy with a tear in his eye in the living room. It was the only painting we had. Many living rooms in the Netherlands in the 1960s had a painting similar to ours. As a young boy paintings like this were synonymous for me with the whole of painting, the whole of art for that matter. Not until years later my horizon broadened and I knew our gypsy painting was kitsch, art for the masses. In that same decade, and well into the 70s, gypsy records were popular in our country too, on the continent, and from what I find in thrift stores these days, in the United States as well. A gypsy violinist was synonymous for virtuosity in music. Times have changed, the gypsies go by the name of the Rom people now, their music celebrated in the most advanced cultural cycles, but the records of the 60s, made for a mass audience, commercial as they are, still hold moments of brilliance, magic, and that equivalent of the “tear-in-the-eye painting” for me.
My latest 25 cent gypsy record is one of George Boulanger, the “King of the Gypsy Violin”. The best tunes are like that painting on the wall of my parent’s house, a tear running down the cheek. The tracks on the record are partially standards and partially Boulanger’s own compositions. The stand-out track is Gloomy Sunday, a song recorded by many singers in the western world. Billie Holiday’s version is one of sheer beauty. I did not know until recently that it originally was a Hungarian song, written by Rezsö Soress. Gloomy Sunday in Hungarian is Szomolá Vasárnap. On Boulanger’s record the title is listed in English, Boulanger is from Romania.

With friends we sometimes play the game “YouTube-off”, in which each participant selects a YouTube video within a certain category, the participants then vote on the winner. In the category “sad” I nominated the song Szomolá Vasárnap in the version by the Hungarian actress Erika Marozsán. The video was just a still, a photograph of a sad statue of a woman’s face that was rained upon (so it looked like tears).
It didn’t get any votes :_(

But I didn’t take the opportunity to elaborate on the song’s history. It was written in the direst of circumstances and myth has it that many people committed suicide after hearing the song. It may well be the saddest song ever written.