Anatolian Folk (Türkü)

Türkü is the umbrella term for Turkish regional folk song, with distinct sub-traditions for the Black Sea coast, central Anatolia, the Aegean and the southeast. The defining instrument is the bağlama (also called saz), a long-necked fretted lute with seven strings in three courses. Other regional instruments include the kemençe fiddle (Black Sea), the zurna shawm and davul drum (eastern Anatolia), and the kaval end-blown flute. Songs use Turkish makam modal systems, which include intervals smaller than the Western half-step.

The aşık tradition — wandering singer-poets accompanying themselves on saz — has roots reaching back to medieval Central Asian Turkic oral poetry. Twentieth-century figures like Aşık Veysel (1894–1973) and the Alevi poet Pir Sultan Abdal (sixteenth century, sung through to today) form a continuous lineage. The Ankara Radio Folk Music Choir, founded in 1953, codified hundreds of regional songs into a national repertoire, sometimes at the cost of sanding off regional edges.

The saz's drone strings — the bottom course — ring under the melody continuously, the way a sitar's sympathetic strings do. Listen for the microtonal intervals in the upper register, which are not out of tune but are following Turkish makam theory. The vocal style is open-throated and direct, with melismatic ornamentation reserved for line ends.

Aşık Veysel's Uzun İnce Bir Yoldayım is the canonical single song. Neşet Ertaş's Gönül Dağı and the Kalan Music regional folk compilations cover the breadth of the tradition.

The Turkish word türkü literally means a Turkish thing or a Turkish song — the term consolidates an enormous regional diversity under a single national label, a piece of cultural policy as much as a musical one.