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Vietnam

Trịnh Công Sơn's definitive voice

Khánh Ly

Khánh Ly, born Nguyễn Thị Lệ Mai in Hanoi, was singing in Saigon and Đà Lạt clubs by seventeen. Her career changed course in 1967 when she teamed up with songwriter Trịnh Công Sơn. During the anti-war years the two sang his songs together for free at Quán Văn, a student coffeehouse, and on the steps of Saigon's Văn Khoa University. She became the definitive interpreter of his catalog, and Vietnamese audiences rarely think of one without the other. After 1975 she fled as a refugee with her four children and eventually settled in California. There she rebuilt her career recording for the overseas Vietnamese audience, work that would come to define the Little Saigon music scene for decades.

Saigon's 'doll' of 1970s pop

Thanh Mai

Thanh Mai started performing as a teenager in pre-1975 Saigon. Musician Nguyễn Ánh 9 discovered and mentored her, and across South Vietnam's youth-pop "nhạc trẻ" scene she was known as "Búp Bê Thanh Mai," the Thanh Mai Doll. In the early 1970s she recorded as half of a well-known duo with singer Quốc Dũng. She emigrated in 1977 and kept performing for overseas Vietnamese audiences in France and the United States into her early forties. Saigon's youth-pop scene is a corner of Vietnamese music history that mostly survives now only on records like her pre-1975 ones.

The Collection