Home  |  What's New
 

Download All
My MP3s

Favorite Links
 

The Streets of Cairo.midi


The song was introduced to the collective consciousness of the American public a century ago by Sol Bloom, a show business promoter who later became a U.S. Congressman. Bloom was the entertainment director of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, which was celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World. One of its attractions, called A Street In Cairo, included snake charmers, camel rides, the infamous dancers that later spawned the legend of Little Egypt, and other exciting things to entertain turn-of-the-century fair-goers. In his prestigious role, he made more money than the President of the United States--$1,000 a week.

In his autobiography, Bloom claimed that he improvised the melody on the piano at a press briefing in 1893 to introduce Little Egypt. Since he didn't copyright the piece, several other composers of his time used the melody for their songs. Sheet music editions that featured the melody included:

Hoolah! Hoolah!
Dance Of The Midway
Coochi-Coochi Polka
Danse Du Ventre (French for "Belly Dance")
Kutchi Kutchi
The Streets Of Cairo
Kutchy Kutchy

Even famous composer Irving Berlin reportedly used the popular melody in his song, "Harem Nights." Although many variations on this same tune were copyrighted, only one has remained well-known today: The Streets Of Cairo, written by James Thornton.

The first five notes of a French song named Echos du Temps Passé published in 1857 are identical to those of Streets of Cairo, including harmony and meter. According to The Book Of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk, the sheet music for it refers to it as a "dance song" and comments that the first phrase of the melody resembles almost note for note an Algerian or Arabic song titled "Kradoutja," which became popular in France in the early 1600's. Unfortunately, modern-day scholars have not been able to locate any musical scores or lyrics for Kradoutja.

In an interesting modern-day independent confirmation of this, New York dance researcher Morocco independently discovered this song was known in the Middle East. When she was dancing in Baghdad, Iraq in the late 1960's, an old woman played it on her oud for her. The woman's grandmother, who lived before the time of the Chicago exposition, taught it to her. In the grandmother's era, which was decades before the Wright brothers built a functional flying machine, when trans-Atlantic travel via ship was still a dangerous undertaking, there was no way the grandmother could ever have been influenced by anything Sol Bloom might have been doing in Chicago. But if the melody had been known in the Orient since at least 1600, possibly earlier, as the French song's sheet music asserted, then it certainly could have spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa by the time of the 1890's.

Since Bloom claimed he had composed the song, we'll never know how it came to his attention. One possibility is that he heard it played by the North Africa musicians he'd brought to Chicago. Or, perhaps the connection was through the Orientalists of Europe--there was certainly a great deal of Orientalist influence on the U.S. entertainment industry of the early 20th century.

© 2003-2006 by John Patrick.  All rights reserved.  All wrongs reversed.
Last Revised: 16 September 2006   Conditions of Use.  Thank You.  Known Bugs.   

All materials on this website are protected by copyright and trademark laws and may not be used for any purpose whatsoever other than private, non-commercial viewing purposes. Derivative works and other unauthorized copying or use of stills, text, sounds or graphics is expressly prohibited.