Zabelle Panosian, WWI Era Armenian Singing Star, Remembered in New Book and CD Reissue

The story of this project begins with Nagoski’s longtime obsession with vintage recordings from the Armenian, Greek, Arabic, Assyrian, Sephardic Jewish, and other Mediterranean and Near Eastern communities in the United States. Initially inspired by recordings of early Greek café singer Marika Papagika which he came across as a record store owner in Baltimore, Nagoski set out on a quest to learn as much as possible about the musical context for her haunting songs. Noting that early Armenian, Greek, and Arab immigrants played music (often sung in a common language of Turkish) alongside one another in venues like Manhattan’s long-vanished Greektown district on 8th Avenue, Nagoski dove headfirst into the multiethnic musical culture which stemmed from the experience of mostly minority Christian and Jewish ethnic groups that had fled the Ottoman Empire, a music scene which in large part moved its center from Constantinople to New York City in the wake of the First World War and eventually gave birth to genres such as “kef time music” in the Armenian community and “rebetiko” in the Greek community. Nagoski reissued and documented much of this music in his 2011 release, “To What Strange Place.” Although the story of the “rebetiko” music of 1930s Greece has now become well-known, the Armenian, Arabic, and even Greek-American side is less recognized, let alone the classical styles presented by members of these immigrant communities.

That brings us to Zabelle Panosian. Perhaps due to his wide-ranging musical tastes (his mother was an operatically trained singer), Nagoski was able to hear the exquisite talent of Panosian over the scratchy surface noise of the discs on which her voice was memorialized. The 78-rpm format was a disc the size of a dinner plate made of shellac with one song on either side, each roughly 4 minutes long. These discs, harder and more brittle than the more well-known vinyl 33-rpm LPs and 45-rpm singles, were popular from the 1910s up until they were phased out in the mid-1950s. They’re what your grandmother likely listened to on a “Victrola,” and most people that collect them are interested in early jazz, blues, and big band swing.

The few collectors that had been interested in the Armenian-American community’s output on these discs had focused on the Anatolian and Armenian folk styles, the oud-driven music that was played by names like Udi Hrant and Marko Melkon, the musical forbears of the likes of Onnik Dinkjian, Richard Hagopian and John Berberian. Classical interpretations of the works of Gomidas, Yegmalian, and others had mostly been ignored — after all, such works are recorded as sheet music and still performed by highly trained professionals in Armenia today; they did not necessarily seem unique to some now-lost immigrant experience like the Anatolian music was; and so scratchy records of classical Armenian works have not been in high demand.

But Nagoski heard something different in Panosian’s voice; her incredible vocal range and technique, as well as her touching story; an immigrant girl from an Anatolian village who married at 16 to a well-to-do Armenian in Boston and dreamed of being a great opera singer (she touted her tenuous attachment with the short-lived Boston Opera Company the rest of her career). Not to mention the fact that she was sort of the poster girl for the relief effort for the Armenian Genocide. Panosian’s was a voice and a story which it seemed almost criminally impossible for us to not know more about. Nagoski aimed to change that with the publication of this book.

The Book

The slim 80-page volume is attractively designed and includes numerous vintage photographs of Panosian as well as her daughter, Adrina Panosian (stage name, Adrina Otero), who performed as a Spanish dancer on the stage and in early Hollywood films. Much of Panosian’s later career was dedicated to furthering the artistic ambitions of her daughter, with whom she travelled to Europe in the 1920s.