You Are My Sunshine

You Are My Sunshine is among the most famous of Ahmad Zahir's cross-cultural recordings — a demonstration that his eclecticism extended beyond the Persian and South Asian traditions that formed his classical base. The American folk-country standard, written by Jimmie Davis and first recorded in 1939, became in his hands something that belonged simultaneously to its American origin and to the Afghan musical vocabulary he inhabited.

The recording is evidence of the Kabul of the 1970s: a city with foreign embassies, university students who owned Western records, cinemas showing international films. Ahmad Zahir was a product of this cosmopolitan moment, and his willingness to sing American songs in an Afghan register was part of his cultural project — the attempt to demonstrate that Afghan culture could be both particular and universal.