(from bandcamp.com)

When he arrived at Ellis Island on February 24, 1926, Kime Nanchoff gave his surname first in its Serbo-Croatian variant Nencevic before replacing it with the corrected Bulgarian spelling, Nanchoff. He was tall and thin and said that he was 27 years old (born ca. Nov. 22, 1899, although his year of birth varies widely on this documents), had previously lived in Elwood City, Pennsylvania, a steel town north of Pittsburgh where he was returning, and that he had been a farmer. His older brother Riste Nanchoff lived in Follansbee, West Virginia, in the panhandle separating western Pennsylvania from Ohio, working the coke oven at the La Belle Iron Works.

Nanchoff was born in the village of Kriveni in southwestern present-day North Macedonia (then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia) and left behind a pregnant 24-year-old wife named Zorka. He did not see their son for twenty-eight years. Kriveni, a town of about 700 souls 49 kilometers west of the small city of Bitola, was home to several members of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, a guerrilla militia that initially fought the ruling Ottoman Empire for Macedonian autonomy before becoming a fighting force for the interests of the Bulgarian minority. (Kriveni’s current population numbers only a couple of dozen people.) Before settling permanently in the U.S., Nanchoff survived the Ilinden Uprising of 1903, the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, the Ohrid-Debar uprising of 1913, and World War I (1914-18), all before he was 20 years old.

Within three months of his arrival, he was living in Detroit, where on June 1, he filed his First Papers, declaring his intent to become an American citizen. By 1931, he was working as a machinist in a steel mill for several years in Lorain, Ohio. He moved to Lima, Ohio for a while before finally settling in the Kenmore section of Akron in the early ‘40s. A 1938 article in the Akron Beacon Journal estimated that a thousand Macedono-Bulgarians were then living in Akron and Summit County. 50,000 Macedonians were living in the U.S., of which 75%, it said, were ethnic Bulgarians. 5,000 were living in Detroit.

In Akron, Nanchoff formed his band, apparently marginally employed and managing to eke out a living playing weddings and parties. The band recorded 26 sides, of which 75% are presented on this collection. Some copies of the resulting discs state on their labels that they were “Distributed by Delmar and Co., Detroit.” Delmar’s 501 Monroe St. storefront sold imported “exotic international food” and, by 1948 RCA Victor televisions. It was that year that the RCA Victor’s Indianapolis, Indiana record pressing plant received the metal parts for the custom job of pressing Nanchoff’s 13 discs. It’s possible that the band recorded their performances after hours in the Delmar store. (Delmar, in its recent incarnation as a restaurant, just closed in Nov. 2023). They were certainly recorded to tape and, from the sound of them, likely produced in a single session. One instrumental among them is a tune named for the Bulgarian revolutionary Vlad Chernozemski, b. 1897; d. 1934, of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, who assassinated King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934.

Walt Mahovlich points out that the accordionist on the discs pressed by RCA was Paul “Spaso” Vangeloff (b. Yugoslavia, Feb. 25, 1920; d. Lorain OH, Sept. 10, 1996) and that the drummer was Chris Athens (b. Yugoslavia, Aug. 4, 1907; d. Cleveland OH, June 23, 1983). We remain unclear about the identity of the banjo player. Larry Weiner points out that the band recorded an additional eight songs for the 5 Star label in 1949 with an additional saxophonist.

Kime remained married to Zorka. (She may have lived with him in Lorain in the early ‘30s using the Americanized name Rose, or he may have had another wife named Rose. We’re not sure.) They had a daughter named Gena Provska, but ultimately Zorka settled in Detroit. He filed for divorce on the grounds of neglect in May 1950 at which time he was living in Akron as a lodger with a widowed barmaid and had still never gotten around to becoming a citizen. A couple of months later, he married a woman named Malpa (May), but they divorced after only eight months.

In 1954, Kime Nanchoff made a brief trip back to Macedonia to meet his grown son Jovan who was living in Resen, just seven kilometers from where Kime had been born and raised. Jovan had survived the Second World War, having been drafted into the army and fighting the German occupation. Kime asked Jovan to return with him to the U.S., but Jovan declined. Kime made the same journey for the same purpose again two years later and received the same answer; by that time, Jovan was married and had two sons. On a third trip in 1968, Jovan, who was then working as a chauffeur, accepted Kime’s offer and brought his family to Ohio where Jovan took a job at the Akron Equipment Company, making tire molds for 15 years. The two grandsons, George and Louis, both became professional soccer players in the U.S. with long and distinguished careers.

Kime Nanchoff died on Oct. 15, 1993.
credits
released April 1, 2024

Transfers, restorations, and notes by Ian Nagoski

Thanks to Walt Mahovlich and Larry Weiner
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Left click on the scanned record image to hear the music