All Albums Ripped From Original CDs
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All Songs @ 224 Kbs Quality
::: Biography :::
Umm Kulthum was born in a small rural village to a poor family.Her father,al-Shaykh Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Baltaji (d. 1932), was the imam of the local mosque, and her mother, Fatmah al-Maliji (d. 1947), was a housewife.Her date of birth is not known for certain,but the most reliable suggestion is May 4, 1904, given on a page from the Daqahliyah provincial birth records for Tammay al-Zahayrah. Umm Kulthum's mother cared for the children: Umm Kulthum, her sister, Sayyidah, about ten years older than Umm Kulthum, and her brother, Khalid, who was one year older.Umm Kulthum was her last child. She described her mother as a good woman who lived simply and taught her children the importance of truth, humility and trust in God.The family house was a small one made of mud brick; they owned no other property.When she was about five years old, Umm Kulthum entered the kuttab, or Qur'an school, in her village that her older brother Khalid attended.Umm Kulthum learned to sing from her father.When al-Shaykh Ibrahim discovered what she had learned and heard the unusual strength of her voice, he asked her to join the lessons. Umm Kulthum began performing in her own village at the house of the oumdah on an occasion when Khalid felt ill.A number of people encouraged Umm Kulthum and her father to consider going to Cairo to further her career in the center of the entertainment business. The move was finally accomplished in about 1923 with the aid of musical mashayaikh from the city with whom Umm Kulthum and her father had established contact. They helped the young girl find performing opportunities and meet the theatrical agents who were essential to Following hints in the spring of 1926 that she should not succeed in the long run accompanied by her family, she hired accomplished and prestigious instrumentalists in their place. Her repertory of religious qasa'id and tawashih gave way to new During the 1920s and 1930s, Umm Kulthum began to make commercial recordings and launched her life-long involvement with mass media, essential to her long and extensive popularity. Her commitments later expanded to include radio, from the inception of Egyptian National Radio in 1934, films, which she began in 1935, and television in 1960. andsustaining a career in the entertainment world at the time.Umm Kulthum's musical directions in the 1940s and early 1950s and her mature performing style caused this period to be popularly called the "golden age" of Umm Kulthum.In 1946,personal problems thrust themselves on Umm Kulthum in such a way as to disrupt her professional activities for the first time in her career.Questions about Umm Kulthum's personal life, especially that of why she had never married,followed Umm Kulthum from the time she began her career in Cairo until she married Dr. Hasan al-Hifnawi in 1954. In the 1920s she was linked with a number of men,including poet Ahmad Rami. Her apparent strong will, sharp tongue and absence of any lasting close personal involvements prompted the assessment that "she has no heart.Another that, "like Greta Garbo" she had been disappointed in love early in life and could not love another.Feeling the disappointment of the broken engagement and the burdens of medical problems, Umm Kulthum agreed to marry a fellow musician,the oud player, composer and them vice-president of the Musician's Union,Mahmud Sharif. The marriage was dissolved within days, regarded by both parties as a mistake, amid a tremendous outcry of protest from Umm Kulthum's fans who attacked the character, personal status, and abilities of Mahmud Sharif. "as if the man had not a single good quality." Finally Umm Kulthum married one of her doctors and a long-time audience member, Dr. Hasan al-Hifnawi, in 1954.During the 1950s and 1960s Umm Kulthum expanded her role in Egyptian public life.She granted more interviews during which she spoke about her life, repeatedly identifying herself as a villager, a fallahah or peasant, who shared a cultural background and essential values with the majority of the Egyptian populace.Her interviews were full of stories of her family, her neighbors, and the familial qualities of village life.The health problems that plagued Umm Kulthum throughout much of her ***** life worsened as she aged. her eyes remained hypersensitive to light and in her later years, she wore dark glasses almost all the time. Beginning in 1971,Umm Kulthum's health deteriorated dramatically. In March of that year, she suffered a gall bladder attack which resulted in the postponement of her March and Aprilconcerts. The following winter, she was struck with a serious kidney infection that forced the cancellation of two more concerts in February and March of 1972.During the first concert of the following season, in December of 1972, Umm Kulthum felt faint during the program. She sang the entire concert, but it was her last. Failing health caused her to cancel the remainder of the season and, although she constantly planned to perform again, she never did so. She spent her time from the winter of 1973 through the summer of 1974 traveling to Europe and the United States to kidney specialists and suffering continually from weak health.The song "Hakam alayna al-hawa'" was scheduled for premiere in the spring of 1973. As was her custom, Umm Kulthum planned to record it before its first performance. She did so with great difficulty on March 13, 1973. The recording occupied twelve hours. For the first time, she sang while sitting in a chair, quietly brought to her by a recording engineer who saw that she was too weak to remain standing. the concert at which the song was to have been premiered was cancelled and the recording was released, never having been performed for a live audience.On January 21, 1975, she suffered the final kidney attack that led to her death on February 3. Despite years of medical treatment, she resisted hospitalization at this time, saying that "If I go to the hospital, I'll die there."She died of heart failure on February 3, 1975. Her funeral was to be held at the Oumar Makram mosque in central Cairo, the site of most funerals for well-known Muslims in the city
