নামঃ শাহ আব্দুল করিম
In 1915,
Ujandhal, Dirai, Sunamganj where this legendary baul musician was born. Growing
up with poverty, he started expressing his thoughts and emotions from very
early age. Ektara, an instrument of music being his medium to express his
thoughts, villager’s heart melted with his melodic and soothing voice. With so
many time devoted in singing, hardly he could make time to make his way to
think about livelihood or any other job than entertaining people. But he was
forced to earn living hardship by harvesting. But music never left him even
with so much obstacles and poverty. As the time goes by, and as he was maturing
with age, he went on taking training of spiritual and baul music from Kamal
Uddin, Shadhak Rashid Uddin, Shah Ibrahim Mastan Baksh. His versatility ranged
from Baul song, Spiritual song to Bhatiali. He went on learning all the
exclusive modules of Baul song afterwards along with Shariatti, Marfatti,
Nabuot, Belayat, etc. He was motivated by philosophy of renowned Lalan Shah,
Panju Shah and Duddu Shah. Throughout his life he has written and composed more
than 1600 songs to date. Although, he performed in England on 1964 and 1985,
not a single musical album has been released by this Soulful Singer. He has
been out of limelight of fame and fortune. But his legendary songs remixed by
various musical bands like Dolchhut, Bangla and Habib/ Kaya is very popular,
such as “Gari Choley na”, “Maya Lagaise”, “Krishno”! These songs created huge
audience popularity. Thus, very recently we could come to know about Baul Shah
Abdu Karim. Most of the credits of these were remained as collected; none knew
the man behind until very recent. He achieved “Amar Ekushey” award on 2001 and
Bangla Academy published English translation of his 10 numbers of songs. We
have lost this Nobel person at 12th September 2009.
