First Impressions: Fairuz on the Radio
Words and Mixtape by Rami Soudah
Fairuz with Ziad Rahbani. Photo courtesy of We Want Sounds via The Brooklyn Rail
Celebrity culture is a peculiar thing: those we adore exist in our memory in their best form. We remember their best song, their best looks, their greatest moments. It gives them an air of divinity and immortality, and this appearance of absolute perfection. The reliance on their image at its peak is almost certainly a deliberate PR strategy to create a distinction between the superhumans – those who have distinguished themselves – and the average person. It behooves us to humanize those that we have put on a pedestal for so long, if only to make ourselves feel better by reminding ourselves that fame, success, notoriety, is attainable by everyone. There is no superhuman and no average, nondescript person: we are all people, and anyone has the potential to be known.
Looking into the earliest days of these celebrities is one such way of humanizing them, to show that these people did not come out of the womb divine, but rather, it was all attained through hard work and dedication to their craft even if oftentimes talent is involved. Anyone who has ever been called “talented” in an attempt to dismiss their hard work will remind you that talent is nothing if you refuse to hone it. In my afikra Forward (a type of presentation delivered at afikra community events around the world), I attempted to study the early days of Fairuz – when she’d just started out. The purpose being, not just to humanize her, but to catch a glimpse into a period when radio stations were a highly popular and valuable reference for news, entertainment, and information. Fairuz not only lived and thrived through radio, but she also grew out of it. Her career in the 50’s can tell us a bit about why radio stations are not as relevant as they once were.
Tracing Fairuz’s Childhood to Career
From a really young age, Nuhad Haddad had been singing in school performances and choirs. It seemed to be something she’d gained a reputation for in school. At one such school performance, Nuhad was heard singing by Mohammed Flayfel, head of the music department at the Syrian Broadcasting Station. Flayfel and his counterparts in other radios were known to scout new singing talents for their respective radio stations from such events. Flayfel encouraged Nuhad to pursue the head of the music department at Radio Liban – who was Halim Al Roumi – a highly motivated individual with a modern vision for the Lebanese song.
Nuhad met with Halim Al Roumi, and according to his testimony, she recited to him the songs “Ya Zahratan Fi Khayaly” by Farid Al Atrash, and “Ya Deeraty,” a mawwal (technically a monologue) sung by Asmahan. Al Roumi was impressed, and hired Nuhad as a singer in Radio Liban’s female chorus, where she would sing alongside three other young women, and four men. It is also at this meeting when Nuhad adopted the stagename “Fairuz”, which was amongst the suggestions she pondered with Al Roumi, including “Shahrazad”.
Fairuz was taken under Halim Al Roumi’s wing, and performed her first songs ever at the radio station. The first time Fairuz’s name appeared was to promote a new song of hers, that was to be aired for the first time sometime in October of 1950. The broadcast schedule entry only read “Fairuz in a brand new song,” without naming the song, which has left the first step in Fairuz’s career a mystery for the foreseeable future.
Via Medina Portal
Fairuz quickly distinguished herself from the other choirists, and though she had begun her career in late 1949, singing the works of Halim Al Roumi, George Farah, Nicola Al Manni, and Clovis Al Haj (and other forgotten composers of early nahda Lebanon), by the summer of 1950 she had been noted as an up-and-coming star in the station. And as the entry in October suggests, by fall of that year she’d already advanced to become a solo performer. It was around this time that Al Roumi introduced Fairuz to Assi and Mansour Rahbani. The pair were longtime composers and performers at Radio Liban, who had also been guided by Al Roumi. Initially, Assi confessed that he did not find Fairuz’s voice appealing, and failed to see the potential that Al Roumi had noticed in it. He came around quickly, and only a few months later provided Fairuz with the first three Rahbani songs she would perform: Habaza Ya Ghoroub, Etab – a poem composed in a traditional Eastern style – and Maroushka, an Arabized song from France. All three songs became breakout hits for Fairuz and are individually credited for putting her on the map officially.
via Claudia El Khal
Adel Malek, Fairuz and Assi Rahbani in 1963 via Wikipedia
Between 1951 and 1954, Fairuz and the Rahbani Brothers solidified their artistic union, and worked tirelessly between the three largest local radio stations: Radio Liban, Radio Syria, and the Near East Broadcasting Station. The trio produced hundreds upon hundreds of songs regularly, and became radio sensations. The Rahbani Brothers had established themselves as revolutionary pioneers of the modern Lebanese song, as members of a group called the Gang of Five, which included Halim Al Roumi and Philemon Wahbe as well. Fairuz even adopted other stage names in order to gain more airtime and bypass the radio’s limits and regulations, such as Fatat Al Jabal (The Girl of the Mountain).
Fairuz and Assi Rahbani’s Wedding via Al Majalla
In January of 1955, Fairuz and Assi Rahbani got married, and spent their honeymoon in Egypt, where they signed an agreement with Radio Egypt to record 48 songs for the station for an undisclosed amount of money that – rumor has it – was the largest sum any performer in Radio Egypt has seen. If true, this means that Fairuz managed to get a paycheck from Radio Egypt larger than Farid Al Atrash, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, or Oum Kolthoum ever saw – an outrageous if not a little fun speculation!
From February until August, the trio fulfilled their agreement with Radio Egypt, which produced some of the best songs of Fairuz’s repertoire of the time. This era reflects a massive elevation in the quality of work produced by the trio. They returned to Lebanon awash with success and newfound fame in one of the hardest domains to breach: the Egyptian celebrity sphere. In Egypt, Fairuz was known as the singer of Yaba La La, one of the many songs she recorded, but which received great acclaim there. Likewise, Assi Rahbani was known as the composer of Yaba La La.
Upon their triumphant return, work resumed as expected, until the breakout of the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956. At that time, the Near East Broadcasting Station, the most popular and powerful of the stations, which served as a gateway between the Arabic music scene and the world, shifted into its (allegedly) intended purpose: a propaganda tool for the BBC. After airing a variety of anti-Pan Arab and anti-Nasser propaganda – while both of these things were highly popular in the Middle East at the time – the station lost its audience and its talent, as they all migrated to the smaller local stations.
Via NTS Live
In March of 1957, the Near East Station shut its doors for good and took its repertoire – consisting of thousands of forgotten songs from the entire Arab World – back to London where it was lost forever. The shutdown of the Near East Station can be said to have been the death knell of the radio industry in the Middle East, as many artists and composers lost so much of their valuable work done at that station, and were unable to recreate any of it. As for the Rahbani Brothers and Fairuz, they re-recorded a great deal of their music in this period, but seemed to have accepted the need to move on to something bigger, like most of the music scene at the time.
Fairuz at the Baalbek Festival in the 60s via Open Edition Journals
Via Bibliolore
Coincidentally, around this time, the first lady of Lebanon Zelfa Chamoun had begun work on revitalizing the Baalbeck Festival as a distinctly Arab, Lebanese, folkloric cultural celebration, rather than its initial purpose as a venue that hosted music and dance troupes from Europe. The Rahbani Brothers, alongside their colleagues, were approached to conceptualize a “Lebanese Nights” segment for the festival, to signal its rebirth. Fairuz appeared on the steps of Baalbeck for the first time in the summer of 1957, performing the song Lebnan Ya Akhdar Hilou as part of the Lebanese Nights skit. This skit can be seen as the spiritual predecessor of the sprawling theatrical repertoire that the Rahbani Brothers delved into shortly after, and continued to present in Baalbeck for the next 2 decades.
Fairuz’s early days and rise to fame is not something that is often discussed, as our collective perception of her seems to surround her peak exclusively. Having no before or after, feeds into her fans’ wish to keep Fairuz as an immortal entity. But digging into her mostly forgotten past, with the shortage of records surrounding that period, serves as a great reminder that everyone starts somewhere.
