We memorize and repeat many works and believe that they are from popular folklore, but the origin of these words and melodies sometimes has an owner and author. This happens when the fame of the work overshadows its maker due to the intensity of its success and spread among people, and due to the lack of artistic and cultural documentation in the past centuries, there are many works. In our popular heritage, we do not know its authors.
Documentation is important at all stages, even if we live in the age of technology and means of communication. For example, the distinguished Emirati composer Khaled Nasser has melodies that have spread as folklore, specifically the tunes of “Mashgoub” and “Your Love is in the Middle of the Crowd” in the voice of Sinbad Rashid Al Majid, to the point Some people superimposed other poems on it, even though it was executed at the beginning of the 21st century and is documented in his name.
Another example are verses we heard in all the camel races on television, which are:
Long live the humiliated camels
An entire generation memorizes these verses without knowing their author or even who performed them. In a television interview with the beloved Emirati artist Khaled Mohammed, he mentioned to me the reasons for recording this work, which has been shown for years on radio and television. The funny thing is that in the last minutes of filming the interview, one of the lights suffered an electrical fault that extinguished the light. We could have ended the episode where it ended, but we insisted on waiting another hour until the lighting was fixed. Let’s record the story of this work, because the team felt a responsibility to document such important information. We were surprised that the writer of these verses was the great modern poet Bin Karaz Al Muhairi, and he shared his voice in performing them with the late Jaber Jassim and Abdullah Hamid, may God have mercy on them, and Khaled Muhammad, who was a young man in his prime at the time. They were written and recorded in record time on Abu Dhabi Radio, and despite my joy in documenting Information, but I was saddened by the lack of any photo documenting the creativity of this group in producing work like this, even if it was simple, as it turned into something similar to the official song for camel racing in the Emirates.
Research and documentation are the responsibility of all of us, and the honorable artistic work is nothing but a document that future generations will benefit from to understand the cultural structure of their society. I must point out here the great effort undertaken by Brother Saeed Al-Suwaidi, the owner of the “Inherited” initiative, even though it is an initiative concerned with other very profound aspects of Our history, but he is one of the few who take upon themselves the responsibility of historical documentation, and a tribute of respect to everyone who carries out this role in the country.
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