On the cover, in pencil: “Dryanovo songs. Sung by Denka Poptodorova. Written down by Ventseslava Todorova. 1978.” The notebook is thin and the paper has gone grey, but the notes can still be read.
Gana Tananova was born in Dryanovo in 1875 and died there in 1959. As a child she heard the songs and the stories from her parents, Todora and Peyu Penevi. Both of them, the family remembers, were very musical. “Grandmother weaves and sings, and grandfather sews in the shop and sings.”
Gana married Nikola Tananov and they had five children. Their eldest daughter, Penka, was a teacher in Dryanovo and had three children: Denka, Todor and Ganka. The songs travelled down the female line, from mouth to ear.
In 1978 Ventseslava Todorova, the daughter of Todor Poptodorov and a pianist at the Lyubomir Pipkov National Music School in Sofia, sat down and wrote the songs of her aunt Denka into a music notebook.
In 2000 her mother, Svetla Todorova, a piano teacher at the Razvitie 1869 community centre in Dryanovo, gave the notebook to a fifteen-year-old singer from the town with the words: “I am certain the songs are in safe hands and that one day they will be sung!”
They were sung twenty-four years later, on the album “Dryanovki murafetliyki”.