My Folk Song — The Emel Taşçıoğlu Book

The book is in interview (question-and-answer) form and Emel Taşçıoğlu begins her story in the old Hamamönü quarter of Ankara: chimneys smelling of soot, ramshackle one-room houses. She grew up in a two-storey old Ankara house in Gazeller Street; Mehmet Akif Ersoy's house and a small mosque were nearby. At night floor beds were laid out in the big room and the houses were full of relatives and friends from the home village; the inside of the cupboard with a lid in the room was in fact a bathroom.

The author recalls the quarter's residents in vivid detail: Aunt Elmas going to the dustbin with a wire trap in her hand, «mad Muhittin» (said to have gone mad from too much reading), the «destancı» — with rolls of paper in their hands, they would come into the street singing türküs and sell poems and türkü lyrics — and Uncle Çarliston singing mânis with a drum on Ramadan nights. Her father Ali Rıza Güney was a petty civil servant; the family lived on one salary, and poverty «was shared with great love and sincerity». The author recalls these years as a kind of continuation of an unfinished childhood.

In the section «Feeling the Türküs» the singer's musical talent is explained as coming from her father: he grew up in poverty, could not go to school, worked in his father's restaurant, first learned the bağlama at fifteen on a «küflek» (a bağlama made with molasses wax), then became a clerk at EGO, and was also a poet and composer. Music was always played at home; at three Emel would drag the bağlama to her father and say «Daddy, play nana». The father trained her and her brothers (Ekrem, Ertuğrul) regularly; at five Emel could recite eighty türküs by heart.

Her method of memorising is interesting: she does not memorise the words but pictures the story in the türkü (in the words «give life to the stone», a childless woman takes the stone in her arms and begs God). At first her father doubted whether it was talent, then had visitors listen. The idea of a group was suggested to him by visitors. The first stage appearance was on 19 May 1970 at the «Youth and Family Night» of EGO, where her father worked; the famous names of the day, Özay Gönlüm and Necla Erol, also performed, and the EGO general manager at first did not believe that a five-year-old was the soloist.

• The book is in «river interview» form: the singer gives long, conversational answers to the author's short questions
• The text is sincere and in everyday language, enriched with quotations from türküs and folk sayings
• Old photographs, the family archive and handwritten documents (the father's diary) give the book historical weight and accuracy
• Each chapter is built around an event or question, which allows the book to be read chapter by chapter