During a period when the cafes and entertainment venues stretching between Homs and Damascus were a magnet for regional tourism, the memories of many visitors to Syria and its people were associated with the voices of female singers who shaped the features of that era. Kawthar Mansour was one of the most important among them. Kawthar Mansour kept her upbringing and personal life to herself, but she reached a level of fame and popularity in the scene that few others achieved. Kawthar was contemporary to the pre-millennium generation of Syrian popular music, when songs were slower and orchestration was string-based. She also lived through the modern electronic loud generation, collaborating with its stars, such as Talal Al-Daour. Her rich, detailed voice and her wide vocal range helped her navigate various genres, from ataba and mawal to dabke and Iraqi shaabi music, becoming a well-rounded shaabi singer with a delicious archive of recordings to explore. We share three of them here. Kawthar Mansour – Ala Jesser Almaseab (On Almaseab Bridge) On this cassette released by Al Faiha'a Records from Aleppo, we hear Kawthar Mansour performing ataba and shaabi music with both mood and mastery. She leads a small band of musicians like a golden-age singer, wielding her handkerchief and distributing greetings like a seasoned shaabi artist. Kawthar maintains the tradition of Syrian shaabi singers by choosing songs about the agonies of love and abandonment, suiting her fluctuating singing style. Kawthar opens the first side of the cassette with an enjoyable rendition of the song Ala Jesser Almaseab. Her voice fluctuates with her changing distance from the microphone and becomes distorted during high passages, capturing the distinctive, sometimes arbitrary aesthetics of cassette recordings from that era. Kawthar Mansour and Sanaa Al-Hussein – Afrah Wady Khaled (Wady Khaled Weddings) On this cassette from a wedding celebration in Wadi Khaled on the Lebanese-Syrian border, Kawthar Mansour shared the stage with shaabi singer Sanaa Al-Hussein and keyboard player Abdel Hamid Kajak, offering a feast of energy and rhythm, topped by explosive female performances with the intent of teaching waists and shoulders how to dance the dabke. The cassette reaches its peak on the second side with Kawthar and Sanaa's performance of the song Khataba (Suiter), a dabke classic at wedding parties, which is difficult to listen to while seated, due to the rapid keyboard playing and unrestrained singing. The song reveals a high familiarity between the singers' voices and the electronic sound of the keyboard, one complementing the other in successive, feverish sequences of singing and playing. Kawthar Mansour – Arab Al Sharkya (Arabs of The East Side) On this cassette released by Al-Faiha'a Records, we listen to a typical Syrian shaabi recording, where Kawthar Mansour sings ataba with the ease of a singer hosting an evening in her own living room. Her mature and rich voice takes center stage, while the instruments recede in most songs to form a quiet background that shadows Kawthar's singing without crowding it. The second side of the cassette begins with the song Arab Al Sharkya, which flirts with the music of the Syrian Jazeera by relying on the rababa and the Deiri dialect (of Deir Ez Zour). The same side ends with Kawthar's iconic song, Lahjor Qasrak (I’ll Abandon Your Palace), which achieved great popularity in Syria, with Kawthar's most popular version exceeding three and a half million listens on YouTube. The song continues to see abundant revivals and performances to this day. Both songs share themes from Syrian Bedouin society, such as discontent with early marriage. In Arab Al Sharkya, Kawthar sings: "They married me off young / Oh, marriage of regret / May the children of the sheikh who wrote my marriage contract / grow up as orphans."