Seattle-based folk vocal duo The Lonely Coast (Valerie Holt and Anne Mathews) bring us this beautiful Balkan wedding song, recorded at Smoke Farm and ably backed by a small stringed instrument (I might assume ukulele, but it could easily be something much more exotic) and some happily tweeting birds. As with “Medicaid Lullaby,” this is perhaps not our usual fare, but I think that’s only because Ball of Wax hasn’t been on the radar of people making this kind of music up to now, not anything to do with my own preferences. I was delighted to receive this submission and I think it fits quite sweetly in between Olie’s tune and what comes next.
As to the song’s meaning, Holt and Mathews provide this bit of background, from the liner notes to the Teofilovići album Dream Keepers:
The future bridegroom addresses his sweetheart, posing two rhetorical questions: “Koj ce ti kupi al kanarice?” and “Koj ce ti kupi taj burnus pojas?” Al kanariče in local Kosovo-Resava dialect means the red scarf tied round the head of a married woman, and burnus pojas, or more correctly burmus pojas, is the belt a married women ties round her waist. So the questions are: “Who will buy you a red scarf?” and “Who will buy you an embroidered belt?” After these rhetorical questions comes the expected single answer: “Ja tebe Magdo, ja tebe džandžigeru—ja tebe.” The compound noun džandžigeru means “dear heart.” Hence the answer is “I, Magda, I will buy them for you, dear heart.”