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Notes from an author: Dee Peyok reflects on how music and memories have shaped her travels in Cambodia
24.07.2023 - 09:49 / nationalgeographic.com / Ray Charles
Kampot, a river town in southwest Cambodia, is where my book took root. It’s around a three-hour drive from Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, and it’s close to a mountain where my 10-year quest for answers ended in 2012. Here, in an abandoned casino at the mountain’s peak, I stumbled upon the voice of Cambodia’s most famous mid-century crooner-pop star. Alone, but for a stereo, a stranger and me, the singer’s mellifluous voice took flight in the Cambodian language, Khmer. Bouncing off the empty walls, his vocals entwined with a Farfisa organ, its keys squeezing out the melody of Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale. His voice seemed to permeate every cell in my body. I felt as if I was soaring and immediately wanted to know everything about the mystery singer. I discovered later that his name was Sinn Sisamouth. Some call him ‘the Master’, others call him ‘the Golden Voice Emperor’, and many still call him the ‘Elvis of Cambodia’. Some say he recorded as many as 4,000 songs during his 20-year career.
By the time I made it back to that casino two years later, I’d talked at length with the singer’s wife, son and fans; traced the ghost of his steps along the polished floorboards of his childhood home. And it was only truly at this point that I knew I had the beginnings of a book. What was built on a bedrock of intrigue snowballed into a quest that saw me gamble my savings away and cross three continents in search of musicians like Sisamouth. Musicians who shook the establishment in the 1960s and provided cultural respite in war-torn Cambodia in the 1970s. Musicians who survived a genocide in Pol Pot’s killing fields, and the families left behind by those who did not.
Over the course of a decade, it was an eclectic odyssey. I sought out a legendary garage rocker turned recluse deep in the jungle, spoke to a royal court musician-cum-resistance fighter and interviewed Cambodian rock’s enfant terrible — once for nine hours straight — about his remarkable reinventions from rock star to gem miner to sailor to scientist. Kampot’s very own Ray Charles wrote a song for me, I went on tour with some revivalists, accidently spent a tense night with the Khmer Rouge guerrilla army and witnessed the reunion of one band in New York 40 years since they last met, some 8,000 miles from where they formed in Phnom Penh.
The music that captured me couldn’t have grown anywhere but mid-century Cambodia: a country unshackling itself from 90 years of colonial rule. Its capital, dubbed the ‘pearl of the Orient’ and the ‘Paris of the East’, was rapidly modernising, revelling in a second golden age, the first having begun centuries before when Cambodia’s magnificent temples were built. Cities and towns became a melting pot of
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