Ubiquitous Romani folk lyrics: "Keren Chave"?
May 14, 2013 1:41 PM   Subscribe

There's a set of lyrics which appears in several different Roma folk settings, sometimes reversed, and usually with similar but not identical tunes; AFAICT, the urtext is called "Keren Chave" or perhaps "Keren šavořale". I'm curious about its history and how it derived multiple variations, and whether there's a canonical order for the verses.

So the lyrics which appear in various orders are (lyrics courtesy of this site, which seems to favor a Romanian-ish orthography; I know very little about the Romani language or the orthographic conventions of the Lovari dialect, so I'm taking these as reasonably accurate) given below; the first five appear in every setting, while the last seems a little less common.

Keren, šavořale, drom,
Te khêlel o phuro řom


Phuro řom te khêlela
biš taj jek džes malavla
or amari voja kerja.

Duj, duj, dešuduj,
čumidav me lako muj.


Lako muj si rupuno,
puške trubula dino
or taj o savo szomnakuno.

Amari si, amari,
amari cini bori.


Hoi, te merav
te na čačipan phenav!


So there are a number of different settings I've encountered these same lyrics -- often in different orders in several places. Some examples are Ando Drom's "Keren Chave", and a differently-styled recording of what is recognizably the same song by Kalyi Jag. Csókolom's recording of the same name has reordering of the verses. But there are places further afield where these lyrics pop up: Kanizsa Csillagai's "Naj laso mange" throws it in as bridge verses on a recognizably different song, and Besh o droM's "Tortapapír" uses it as a motif in a different work (in a different genre).

I know that the answers to any sort of question about folk music evolution might well boil down to "it's folk, it evolves", but I'm curious if anyone has details on the history and development of this piece.
posted by jackbishop to Media & Arts (1 answer total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I wish I could help you better! But I have a few thoughts.

The first is that there are lots of songs like this with very similar lyrics, so much so that you could almost make a lyric-continuum from one version to the next until the point at which the beginning and end songs have very little in common.

Take this for example:

http://www.dunav.org.il/lyrics/niska_banja.html

You can see elements of versions of the songs you posted - the kissing on the mouth, the very common "two two twenty" line. But there are a lot of differences, too. Songs with lyrics similar to this are common enough in the former Yugoslavia, where I'm from, all the way north to the former Czechoslovakia. Hungary's square in the middle of that area. And not always in Romanes or Hungarian. Most of Kanizsa Csillagai's lyrics are in Béas (a sort of archaic form of Romanian) and fairly comprehensible if you know modern Romanian, but this song seems to be in Romanes - at least I can't make it out, though I understand other songs of theirs, like "Jarba" pretty well. I'd love to see printed lyrics. I'd guess - in my embarrassingly ignorant way - that they picked it up from outside Béas folk culture, but I could be wrong.

I don't think I have any Transylvanian or Romanian versions of the song, though I've heard variants of the "two two twenty" thing, which may not be exclusively connected to (in the way that "once upon a time" or "egyszer volt, hol nem volt" don't really belong to a single folk story.) Is this "song" obscure in Romania? I have no idea. It's described as a "Hungarian gypsy" song, but there are many shared songs claimed by differing peoples, especially in eastern Europe.

Muzsikás (a Hungarian folk group) used to travel from Hungary to Transylvania to collect songs that were in danger of being lost and "revive" them - some of them have now been recorded by numerous artists - so what seems like a common "folk" work may actually be a recent thing sprung from as little as a single source.

I wish I could speak with more knowledge, but I can say that you should contact zaelic, who is a contributor here and a musician in Hungary and knows a whole lot about folk musics from Hungary and beyond.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 3:39 PM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]


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