Meryem Xan

Meryem Xan (1904-1949) is the first great female voice of Kurdish music on record. At a time when singing in public placed a Kurdish woman outside every convention, she recorded dozens of songs that fixed classic repertoire in its earliest surviving versions. Her gramophone records circulated across the region and made her a legend within her own short lifetime. For today’s female singers she is the foremother: proof that the Kurdish song tradition has always had women at its centre, even when history tried to keep them out of it.