Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Umm Kulthum - Rak El Habib


Download:
FLAC:   Side A   Side B

Side A
01. Rak El Habib (Part 1)

Side B
02. Rak El Habib (Part 2)

The j-card has titles of praise inscribed on it: Star of the East and First Lady of Arabic Song.  They are well-deserved nicknames.  The lyrics were composed by Ahmed Rami and the music was composed by Mohamed El Qasabgi who composed many wonderful songs for Umm Kulthum and a few other singers.  This is one of Umm Kulthum's most famous and popular works, and for good reason.

There are a couple weird skips in Part 2 which must be due to some laziness during the process of abbreviating the recording (they weren't about to put a 2-hour song on cassette).

Special thanks to daretelayam for the translation.

Here is a sound sample from side A:
Umm (2/21/12) Side A samp by tapesssss

4 comments:

  1. Raq Il Habib (رق الحبيب) or, 'My Beloved Has Mellowed', is one of her most melodramatic pieces ever sung by the Mother of All Arabic Music (another title?).
    Regardless of skips and audio hiccups due to what you've correctly pointed out, the hour-plus long pieces (her music isn't called songs at all), were recorded almost always from theatre haflas or musical concert parties live. I'm sure the recording engineers had done their best to keep the stops and starts to a minimum cacophony. But, happily, even with worn-out, crackling sounds and interruptions found in Umm Kalthoum's music, one can still utterly enjoy the sheer 'musicstacy' of this cassette.

    Allow me to thank you, wholeheartedly.

    Keep digging!

    H.H.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi!!

    Dear friend! Could you reupload part A of this beautiful recordings of Umm Kulthum in flac, please??

    best regards

    ReplyDelete
  3. Big thanks for Side A!!!
    Great work indeed!!!

    ReplyDelete