El guitarrista + Tienes unos ojos niña + El enamorado engañado (El ke toka la kitara)

An Early Twentieth-Century Sephardi Troubadour: The Historical Recordings of Haim Effendi of Turkey
An Early Twentieth-Century Sephardi Troubadour: The Historical Recordings of Haim Effendi of Turkey
El guitarrista + Tienes unos ojos niña + El enamorado engañado (El ke toka la kitara)

Haim Effendi


This selection of three modern Spanish couplets is one of the most outstanding examples of the exposure of Haim Effendi to the late-nineteenth century flamenco repertoire. This recording is characterized by the various repetitions of words in each couplet (sometimes without clear sense), the normative Castilian Spanish pronunciation (e.g. "mujer", "ojos"), its rhapsodic style that contrasts with the fixed meter of the instrumental interludes, and the Andalusian melismas that clearly differ from the ones in Turkish vocal genres. The last couplet (opening "Yo me namurí del aire") has become the beginning of El enamorado engañado, one of the celebrated Ladino songs of the post- WW II period. These recent versions of El enamorado engañado, most of them relying on the musical transcriptions by Isaac Levy (1959, nos. 34, 35), have lost the rhapsodic character of the melody that is preserved in Haim's historical recording. Yet, Isaac Levy himself (1973, no. 74) included one rhapsodic version of this song from an informant that probably remembered Haim's recording (see also Attias 1972, no. 3).


El que toca la guitarra,
le caiga del cielo un rayo,
y que fuerz'una muchacha,
linda di mi corazón,
y que fuerza una muchacha
de 14 a 15 años,
el que toca la guitarra,
le caiga del cielo un rayo.

Tienes unos ojos, niña,
y una niña de estos ojos,
estos ojos d'esta niña,
niña di mi corazón,
estos ojos d'esta niña
son las niñas de mis ojos.
Tienes unos ojos, niña,
y una niña de estos ojos.

Yo me namuri del aire,
del aire de una mujer,
como la mujer es aire,
niña di mi corazón, c
omo la mujer es aire,
en el aire mi quidí.
Yo me namuri del aire
del aire de una mujer.

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