Nicknamed “the star of the east”, she is generally considered the greatest singer in the Arab world.
The famous Egyptian artist Oum Kalthoum is the only Arab personality to be included in the list of the 200 greatest singers of all time published by the famous American pop culture magazine Rolling Stones. “What mattered most in our pick was an artist’s originality, influence, breadth of repertoire, and breadth of musical heritage,” the magazine tweeted.
Oum Kalthoum finished in 61st place, thus ahead of Michael Jackson, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, or even Barbara Streisand and Elton John.
“She has no real equivalent among Western female singers: for decades the Egyptian star has represented, and still represents to some extent, the soul of the pan-Arab world,” we read about her. Oum Kalthoum was born in a village in the Nile Delta. As a young man he wore men’s clothing and sang religious songs. In the 1920s his family moved to Cairo, and that was the beginning of his consecration, he then recorded no less than 300 titles.
Nicknamed “the star of the east”, she is generally considered the greatest singer in the Arab world. In 1926 she signed her first contract with Gramophone Records, which paid her an annual salary and royalties for each record she recorded. In 1932 her notoriety is such that she begins her first oriental tour: in the Levant and in Iraq. Some musicologists consider her works as a new stage in the history of Arab art music; others rather consider them as belonging to a hybrid genre, intermediate between the cultured register and the popular variety. She made her first performances in France at the Olympia on November 13 and 15, 1967.
Parallel to his career as a singer, he also tried his hand at cinema (Weddad, 1936; Le chant de l’espoir, 1937; Dananir, 1940; Aïda, 1942; Sallama, 1945 and Fatma, 1947).
