Yet another one of those songs that everybody knows but nobody knows the name of…and yet another song that was not invented in its purported place of origin. The Streets of Cairo!
The Streets of Cairo is undoubtedly something you’ve heard before, this little ditty written in the Double Harmonic Major scale, the scale most stereotypically associated with the Middle East.
The double harmonic major scale is characterized by taking an Ionian scale, and playing a minor 2nd and a minor 6th. The steps comprising this scale are tonic, diminished second, half step, whole step, half step, diminished sixth, half step. See the video on the double harmonic major for more on THAT.
So now that we know how it’s made, we must ask…who when and where?
Much like the Oriental Riff (see video on that), this is one that kind of existed in its alleged homeland, but was solidified as a musical stereotype by Westerners.
The earliest forebear to it, in fact being identical in rhythm, meter, and notation for the first few bars, is the French song “Echos du Temps Passe”, France of course being in the midst of A) Colonialism and B) Orientalism at the time. Something to exoticize the newly acquired Algerian colony seemed like a great idea.
The sheet music for “Echos du Temps passe” says that it is an adaptation of an old Arabic song called Kradoutja from the 1600s. There has been much research to find this latter song, but it doesn’t exist…kind of. More on that in a bit…
The first song CALLED “Streets of Cairo” was written by American composer and later Senator Solomon Bloom. Before he got into politics he was the entertainment coordinator for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. One of the attractions was a recreated mock Egyptian pavilion, named A Street in Cairo, which had all the exotica one would, camels, odalisques, etc. He claimed to have written the song for said occasion. He didn’t copyright it which led to a flood of knockoffs and borrowings of his melody—the sheet music industry being huge at the time (any respectable family had a piano or guitar to play).
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