Orientalist Party Music

Mohammed El-Bakkar was forty years old in 1952 when his ship pulled out of the port of Cairo. For a decade he’d been a fixture of the Egyptian film industry, a singer with remarkable power and range, but now his hair was thinning and he was putting on weight, and it had been years since he’d been cast in a leading role. He’d turn up as a sailor or a bedouin and belt out a lighthearted novelty number. Or he’d do a cameo as a self-obsessed opera star, serenading his reflection in a dressing-room mirror, unaware that the hero—a younger, handsomer singer—was about to lock him in a trunk and steal his place onstage. The joke was that Bakkar was pompous, a ham, and there was probably some truth to it. Had he been less convinced of his abilities he might have resigned himself to the life of a clown. Instead, he did what hams around the world had been doing for generations. He moved to New York.

The city’s Middle Eastern population consisted mainly of Christians and Jews from Greater Syria, an area that includes what is now the state of Lebanon. The Jews and Christians lived in separate Brooklyn neighborhoods a few miles apart, and musicians traveled back and forth between them, entertaining at bar mitzvahs on Saturday nights and church functions on Sundays. Bakkar, a native of Beirut, was one of the few Muslims on the scene, and certainly the only performer around who could boast of having appeared on-screen opposite the beautiful Tahia Carioca in the Egyptian version of Tarzan. (She played the Tarzan figure and he played her husband.) He sang constantly, at parties and at nightclubs where women danced the raqs charki—Americans called it the belly dance—and in a Times Square studio run by Albert Rashid, a Brooklyn record-shop owner who once had a four-door Ford shipped from Detroit to the port of Beirut and then drove it overland through Syria and Jordan into Egypt, where he delivered it to the movie star Farid El Atrache. Rashid was renowned for his ambition, but Bakkar had ambitions of his own, and after four years with Rashid’s ethnic label, Al-Shark, he defected for a mainstream American company.

If there ever was a good time for an Arab Muslim singer to try to win over an American audience, this was it. Thanks to the advent of the commercial airliner and the rise of the middle class, more Americans than ever were sunning themselves in the tropics, and the hi-fi systems of suburbia were throbbing with cha-cha and mambo and calypso—music that evoked sand and sun and sex. A Mexican kid named Ritchie Valens...