Central Europe: Vlax song and Rom-pop

Slow song and dance song in Romani. Often unaccompanied. Oral bass. Learned in the family, sung at fairs, weddings, pilgrimages. Kovalcsik’s 1981 fieldwork among Vlach Roma in Slovakia (published 1985) is a core collection: fifty transcriptions, slow songs and dance songs, with Hungarian and English translations.

Fennesz-Juhasz describes khelimaski gjili among Lovara and other Vlach Roma in the Hungarian language area: duple time, descending melody, lyrics from the road. Imre and Sándor Csenki collected this inward repertoire in Hungary from 1940 because it was not the café music foreigners had already decided was “Gypsy.”

RomArchive (Orban): Hungarian Roma are commonly grouped as Romungro, Lovari, and Boyash. Joseph II in 1783 forbade the Romani language. Many Romungro and Boyash in Hungary speak Hungarian, not Romani. The café book and this inward song are different jobs in the same country.

Boyash (Beás) in Hungary speak a Romanian-related dialect, not Romani. Kovalcsik (1993): about 30,000, traditional wood-tub makers; Munceans and Ardeleans in southern Transdanubia, Ticeans around Tiszafüred. Their song world looks more like a peasant repertoire living in layers. Kanizsa Csillagai is the named public singing family. Other names wait until they are recorded.

From the 1970s in Czechoslovakia, Romani-language songs on a backbeat. Věra Bílá & Kale remain the filed public name. Eva Davidová’s field tapes of Czech and Slovak Romani song (1958–71), later reissued as Romane Gil’a, are the older vault under the pop. Giľora is the living Czech archive of songs filmed with the people the singers actually sing with.

Kalyi Jag, Hungary, from 1978. Austrian Lovara: Ruža Nikolić-Lakatos (1945–2022). Fekete Vonat: 1990s Romani hip-hop, named on RomArchive. Alabanzas are not this chapter. They sit under Spain and Portugal.