The greatest hits of the singer, songwriter and actor Ferdi Tayfur, who died on Thursday, resounded across schoolyards in his hometown of Adana in southern Turkey on Friday. The sob in his voice, which has caused him to be compared to André Hazes in the Netherlands, is clearly audible. Tayfur is considered one of the most important interpreters of the Turkish song of life, a music genre called ‘Arabesque’. In his decades-long career, which peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, he released more than 30 records and starred in just as many films. He died in a hospital in the city of Antalya and was 79 years old.
Tayfur was born in 1945 in the working-class district of Hürriyet in Adana. His family was dirt poor and there was no money for toys. Tayfur was still young when his father was stabbed during a bar fight. He didn’t survive. His mother remarried a man who did not want to work under a boss. But the family did need money. Instead of going to school, Tayfur went to work in a candy store. To earn extra money, he also started singing at weddings. This was such a success that he decided to take part in a singing competition organized by a radio station in Adana, where he promptly came second.
To pursue a career in music, Tayfur moved to Istanbul in the late 1960s. He found a job in a casino, where he played the saz (Turkish string instrument) for house singer Nurten Innap. But Tayfur wanted more. He signed a recording contract in 1968, and released two albums that sold quite well. But his big break only came nine years later with ‘Cesme’, the title song of a film of the same name in which Tayfur played the leading role. Both the song and the film became a huge hit. There were long lines outside cinemas in cities where the film was showing.
Founder
With his songs, Tayfur was one of the founders of ‘Arabesk’, which became extremely popular from the 1970s onwards. Particularly among the poor migrant workers who had moved from rural Anatolia to Istanbul and other major cities in western Turkey. The genre is known for its tragic lyrics about unfulfilled longing and heartache. Other famous interpreters are Orhan Gencebay, Müslüm Gürses, and Ibrahim Tatlises. Their music was also very popular among Turkish migrants in Europe, where it was spread through the booming cassette tape market.
“’Ferdi Baba’ wrote many beautiful songs about love,” says the Turkish-Dutch singer Ersoy Demir from Arnhem, who has translated several issues of Tayfur into the Netherlands. Demir often draws a comparison with the music of Hazes, which he also has in his repertoire. “Hazes’ songs, such as ‘Kleine Jongen’, touch you directly in your veins. In Turkish we call this kind of music ‘damar’ (vein). This largely has to do with the sob in his voice. If you put on a song by Ferdi, you will hear within three seconds that it is him. Hazes has that too.”
Another similarity with Hazes is that the cultural elite initially had no interest in Tayfur’s music. Arabesque was seen by Turkey’s secular elite as rebellious folk music that was not in line with the European-oriented Turkish classical music broadcast on the state channel TRT. But the new generation has a less frenetic relationship with the once controversial genre. Tayfur’s songs have now become part of the canon of Turkish pop music and are sung at the top of their lungs every weekend in countless meyhanes (restaurants serving mezze and raki) throughout Turkey.