Ethiopian singer Muluken Melesse.
Muluken Melesse family
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Muluken Melesse family
Ethiopian singer Muluken Melesse.
Muluken Melesse family
Famous Ethiopian singer Muluken Melesse died Tuesday in Washington, D.C., after a long illness, according to his family. He was 73 years old.
The singer rose to fame during a time of enormous political and social unrest in Ethiopia, when the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution gave way to a military dictatorship.
Muluken’s songs from the 1970s and 1980s were filled with love and longing for better times.
“He came at a time when people were really depressed,” said Sayem Osman, who has written about contemporary Ethiopian music on blogs and magazines. “He touched people’s hearts.”
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Muluken was born in Gojjam province in northern Ethiopia in 1951.
His mother died when he was young and so he moved to Addis Ababa, the capital, to live with an uncle. But the arrangement didn’t work. Muluken ended up in an orphanage, where he studied singing with a visiting musician who gave lessons there.
“And Muluken, at that time, got the (music) bug,” Sayem said.
Muluken began performing in local clubs in the 1960s, when he was barely a teenager, and eventually became a big star. Love songs like “Mewdeden Wededkut” (“I Love Being in Love”), “Hagerwa Wasamegena” (“She’s from Wasamegena”) and “Nanu Nanu Neyi” (“Come Here, Girl”) became hits .
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“It’s the king of love songs for me,” Sayem said. “It’s all about how you treat a woman, how you see a woman.”
Sayem said Muluken’s popularity had a lot to do with the talented female lyricists he worked with on these songs, including Shewaleul Mengistu and Alem Tsehay Wodajo. “Who but a woman would know how to be described or how to be regarded?” Sayem said.
Muluken Melesse Muluken began performing in local clubs in the 1960s, when he was barely a teenager.
Muluken Melesse family
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Muluken Melesse family
But it was difficult to be an artist in a country under military rule. “There was very heavy censorship,” Sayem said.
Many musicians have left Ethiopia. Muluken stayed for a while. He converted to evangelical Christianity. Eventually, in 1984, he moved to the United States and settled in the Washington, DC area.
He continued to perform groovy love songs for a while, before abandoning them completely to focus on his new faith.
“And that was it. He was done,” Sayem said. “And he never performed that music again.”
Instead, Muluken took to singing gospel songs at religious events.
“He was a very good and sincere person, who loved people and feared God,” Muluken’s widow, Mulu Kaipagyan, also a devoted Christian, said in an online statement shared with NPR.
“YeYesus Wetadernegn” (“I am the soldier of Jesus”) — one of the many songs Muluken Melesse sang after his conversion to evangelical Christianity.
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Although Muluken turned his back on secular music in his later years, his early work continued to influence younger generations of musicians.
“It became for me like a way to delve even deeper into traditional Ethiopian music,” said Ethiopian-American singer, songwriter and composer Meklit Hadero.
Muluken Melesse as a young singer.
Muluken Melesse family
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Muluken Melesse family
Meklit’s 2014 version of the folk song “Kemekem” — which the singer describes as “a love song for the person with the perfect afro” — was inspired by a version made famous by Muluken decades ago.
“I felt such a connection to him,” she said. “And I will be forever grateful to him.”
Meklit added that she can never get tired of Muluken’s singing.
“There’s so much movement and vibrance. It’s alive. You don’t know where it’s going to go. You’re just kind of on a river following its tone and it’s captivating,” she said . “All human experience was contained in that voice.”
Audio and digital story edited by Jennifer Vanasco; audio produced by Isabelle Gomez Sarmiento.
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