Belette Malade
This is way out. To my ears these orchestras play folk in a way My Blue Valentine warped rock music in another strange dimension.
BTW: There's no track 9 "Girl, Tell Me at Once" included.
Favorite track: The Dull Hatchet (Tupa Sokirocka) verbunk.
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“The difference between Europe and America is that in America 100 years is a long time and in Europe 100 miles is a long distance.”
- Dick Gaughan
"At twenty, New York had been authentically the wonder city of the world, a city of wide avenues with the sea at its edge and the smell of the sea in its winds; men from the ends of the earth jostling one in its streets and the loot of the world for sale in its shops. At forty, he reflected, New York was the office in which you worked and the bedroom in which your slept, and in between too many people living too close together. At twenty, nothing was more certain than that you were going to be rich and famous. At forty you knew you'd never be, and you couldn't even pretend you didn't care that money after all wasn't everything, because by the time you were forty you had learned that it very nearly was. At twenty the world made sense; at forty you looked around you with the helpless, numb bewilderment of a man lost in a strange land. At twenty you had a whole lifetime before you; at forty you had, with luck, twenty years. And twenty years wasn't so much. It could be spanned with a memory. It could pass in the twinkling of an eye. It had."
- Thomas Bell, There Comes a Time (Little, Brown) 1946
Lemkos are an ethnic minority native to the Carpathian mountains around the present-day Polish-Slovak border. Tens of thousands of them arrived in the U.S at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, settling mainly around Pittsburgh (Andy Warhol’s family among them) and Cleveland. Thomas Bell’s great novel Out of This Furnace describes several generations of Lemkos around the steel mill in Braddock, Pennsylvania.
Walter Maksimovich and Bogdan Horbals’s wonderful monograph Lemko Folk Music in America, 1928-30 (published by the authors in 2008) describes the details of the recordings of Lemko music for the Okeh, Columbia, and Brunswick labels, instigated and developed by Stefan Shkimba, a streetcar motorman from Brooklyn. Much of that music, along with that of other Rusyns of the old district of Galicia, has been reissued on the CD that accompanies Maksimovich’s book as well as his YouTube channel and other reissues including Christopher King’s Ukrainian and Lemko String Bands in America (JSP, 2011). A handful of labels during the 1940s continued the attempt to document and proliferate music made in the U.S. of Lemkos and Rusyns during the 1940s.
Among them was Poprad, named for the region surrounding the river of the same name that flows from northern Slovakia to southern Poland. The label was apparently run by cultural worker and Lemko activist Nicholas A. Cislak (b. May 8, 1910; d. July 4, 1988). Cislak was born in Uscie Ruskie, Poland, according to his WWII draft registration and married in 1937 in Toronto to a 16 year old named Mary who was born in Brooklyn. The two came to the U.S. together in October, settling in Manhattan where Cislak worked at Schrafft’s Restaurant on W. 23rd St in the 1940s. He was an artist, playwright, and an active member of the Lemko Association based in Philadelphia. About a dozen discs are known to have been made in the late 40s and early 50s on the Poprad label in Elizabeth, New Jersey according to Maksimovich. Poprad’s first releases were by the violinist Orest Turkowsky, but Cislak also brought in a singing accordionist named Wolodya Gonos and a Brooklyn musician named Andrew Kuriplach. Kuriplach, in turn, brought in a few other musicians who recorded the performances presented on this collection.
Andrej Kuriplach was born Oct. 27, 1903. Walter Maksimovich was told by an acquaintance of Kuriplach’s that he was from a village called Woroblyk (Wroblik in Polish) near Rymanow Zdroj in present-day Poland, but Kuriplach’s Ellis Island documentation and his Declaration of Intent to naturalize as a U.S. citizen gives his hometown as Kobulinka (Koberljutza), about 70 miles due south of Rymanow Zdroj near Michalovce in present-day eastern Slovakia He arrived Jan. 16, 1921 and married a woman named Miriam (Mary b. 1901 in Pennsylvania; d. 2002). He delcared his trade on arrival as "cooper" and wound up working for the National Sugar Company on Long Island. He lived intially at 177 Indian St. in the Greepoint section of Brooklyn, before moving six blocks away to 52 Clay St. (His house burned down in a five alarm fire in originating in a nearby warehouse in 1952.) They had two at least two children, John (b. 1928) and Eva (b. 1930).
We have, at present, no biographical data on the performers on these recordings. We know only that they were “produced” or “managed” by Kuriplach and were likely members of his community.
Coincident with these recordings was the ethnic cleansing of Lemkos from their native home by the Communist regime that had taken charge in Poland. During the period 1944-46, Lemko and other Rusyn mountain villagers were quickly, systemically, and forcibly resettled and assimilated in the interiors of the countries in which their homelands were bordered. The efforts of their diaspora in the U.S. in particular have been significant to the conservation of their language and culture.
Song titles are given as listed on the original disc’s labels. Walter Maksimovich has offered corrected translations to the following track titles:
4. It's Raining
5. Both of Us are Making Advances Towards Her
7. Girl, Tell Me at Once
credits
released January 30, 2021
Transfers, restoration, and notes by Ian Nagoski.
cover drawing by Ivan Rusenko, 1959, published in the Lemko Association 1961 almanac.
Thanks to Walter Maksimovich for his research and assistance.
supported by 46 fans who also own “The Dull Hatchet: Late 1940s Lemko Instrumentals in Brooklyn NY”
I love these women. the voices mesh together perfectly; also the world music is exceptional. I have all of their albums and they're all excellent. Give them a listen. Steve Lake
Originally sung by Holocaust survivors in Yiddish, Polish and French, this moving album is now available in a gorgeous LP package. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 11, 2022
