Although this label indicates the lead instrument is the Cretan lyra (a pear-shaped, three-stringed bowed fiddle), my Cretan-music-playing friend Al Davidson insists it’s actually a violin. While Haniotikos simply means “from the city of Hania”, the Crete’s second largest city located along the northwest coast, the fast and wild sounds of this recording suggests it may actually be from the nearby city of Kissamos.

Bruno Villareal was a half-blind accordion player from Santa Rosa, Texas, who played for money around town with a tin cup attached to his accordion. Nicknamed “El Azote del Valle” (the Scourge from the Valley), he became well-known as the first Tex-Mex accordion player to record. He recorded under his own name or as the Texas Accordion Boys, or in this single case, The Rooster. He was a traditionalist, with equal use of the left and right hand. But as the right hand came to dominate the sound, as in the style of Narciso Martinez, old-school players like Villareal were left behind. This song was recorded at the Texas Hotel in San Antonio on August 16, 1935. He died, destitute, in 1976.

Abdel Hamid Kandahari is a Pashtun from Kandahar. Here he sings Cheeri Kariwan on the Russian state-owned label CCCP. This was likely produced by Radio Kabul around 1960. The ensemble consists of rabob, tanbur and sarangi. Unfortunately, the fundamentalist psychopaths known as Taliban have destroyed most of Afghanistan’s remaining cultural artifacts, including whatever 78s they could get their hands on.