This is some of the music that Kalmyk immigrants brought to America in the 1950s and 1960s.

          Your folks took me in, in the 1960s, and gave me a lot of this collection in those years.  It is now on seven CDs, scattered throughout the community.

          These songs have wandered through many countries – Russia, Austria, France, Turkey, Serbia, Germany – and each country left a mark on each song.  This means that for every piece of Kalmyk music there are a hundred ways to sing (or play) it.  We've tried to show a few of them here.

          Remember, too, that in these songs many of the words are so old their meanings have been lost, and any translations of the older songs involve a certain amount of guess work.  As Gawril Budschalow said, "If you got a hundred people to translate a song, you'd have a hundred different translations." So: there is no right way and no wrong way to do this music.  The only way you can hurt it is not to sing it.

          This is only Book I and it's not finished.  It needs your stories, notes, and translations.  Bring them to the KBS Temple and add them to the book that is kept there.  (That's why it is in a 3-ring notebook form.)  They'll try to preserve and share them.

Note about the Pronunciation

Most of the songs in this collection were either written down by Nadja Budschalow or me, using Nadja’s phonetic system, which seemed to work pretty well at the time. Unfortunately, it only worked if you knew what the words sounded like. If you didn’t know, it didn’t work, and many Kalmyks today do not know these sounds.
I tried to devise a way that: 1) covered more of the sounds, 2) was simple to write without using a lot of international symbols, and 3) would help the average “English-only” speaker approximate the basic sounds. When I could, I used Gerel Buruschkin’s phonetics.
So this is a rough guide, and many sounds and differences are not represented, but rather than try to perfect this part, it seemed more important to keep the project moving. Remember, nothing on these pages is the real thing; the only real Kalmyk music is in the voices of the singers, and some of them are still among us.

 ~ Thank you, Gordon Bok