Ahmed Rami

No poet's words passed Umm Kulthum's lips more often than Ahmed Rami's. Over nearly six decades he wrote her roughly a hundred and forty lyrics — by most counts close to half of everything she sang — from the tender colloquial songs of the 1920s to "Hayyart Albi Maak" (1961), his late collaboration with composer Riad Al-Sunbati. Cairo-born and trained as a teacher, Rami studied Oriental languages in Paris and translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam into Arabic verse; Umm Kulthum sang his translation in Al-Sunbati's celebrated setting. He met her in 1924, soon after her arrival in Cairo, and became her tutor as much as her lyricist, drilling her in classical poetry and the fine grain of Arabic diction. His signature is intimacy: plain, singable Egyptian Arabic that treats longing with complete seriousness, each lyric built around a single clear feeling that her voice could turn over for minutes at a time.