You Are My Sunshine

The most famous of his border-crossing recordings, and proof that his ear reached well past the Persian and South Asian traditions that formed him. Jimmie Davis wrote it, America first heard it in 1939, and Zahir made it belong to two places at once: its country-song home and the Afghan idiom he sang from.

It is also a snapshot of 1970s Kabul — foreign embassies, students with Western records, cinemas running films from everywhere. Singing an American song in an Afghan register was part of his whole argument: that Afghan culture could be entirely itself and entirely open to the world at the same time.