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Hot Women is a compilation put together by Robert (Keep On Trucking) Crumb of ”Women Singers from Torrid Regions of the World Taken from Old 78 RPM Records, 1920 to 1950s”.
Here are two sizzling samples!
From the Liner Notes: Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Clemona Falcon: “Blues Negres”: Accompanying herself on guitar, with Joseph Falcon on accordion; Recorded Dec., 1934, New York City, Decca 17004.
She has been fairly well researched. Born Clemona Breaux in the Acadian, or “Cajun” county of Louisiana, she came from a musical family, played and sang in the family band, and with the band of her husband, Jospeh Falcon, in local dance halls and roadhouses, the only woman known in the region to perform in public for money. The Falcons were the first Cajuns to make phonograph records, beginning in 1927. Clemona died in 1941 at the age of 36.
Rita Abadzi, accompanied by instrumental trio: “Mimi Stelis Mana Anastin Ameriki”; Recorded in Athens in the mid-1930s; Issued on Orthophonic S-319.
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Of all the old ethnic music of Europe, Greek music contained a special dynamic, emotional power, forged by the intensive mixing of cultures that seemed to come together there — Western Europe, The Balkans and Turkey, even Albania — creating some of the strongest most compelling European ethnic music recorded in the 78 RPM era.
Rita Abadsi, born in 1903, was one of the more prolifically recorded singers in “The golden Age” of Greek music, 1930s. She sang in the “Smyrna” style, which had an Eastern Turkish flavor, and fed into the hugely popular “Rembetika” genre, all of this music originally from the culture of poverty and low-life cafes. Smyrna, a port city on the Eastern coast of Turkey, facing onto the Aegean Sea across from the peninsula of Greece, was home to a large population of Greeks until the Turko-Greek War, which ended in disaster for the Greeks in 1922. The result was the massive flight of a million Greek refuges back to their ancestral homeland, where they found themselves for the most part huddled in squalid shanty towns on the outer fringes of Athens and Piraeus. Rita Abadsi, with her mother and sister, were part of this tide of unfortunate people, who brought back to Greece several generations of adapted Turkish cultural habits, including musical influences. Thus the “Smyrna” style, of which this record is a fine example, both vocally and instrumentally. I could gather little else about Rita Abadsi’s life. She began recording in 1932, went on to record over two-hundred songs, ended her recording career aroud the beginning of World War Two, and died in 1969. The song title, by the way, translates as “Mother, Please Don’t Send Me to Amerika”!
