The voice of Egypt : Umm Kulthum, Arabic song, and Egyptian society in the twentieth century / Virginia Danielson. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c1997.

"Umm Kulthum was unquestionably the most famous singer in the twentieth-century Arab world. Her performing career lasted over fifty years, from about 1910, when she sang with her father at weddings and special occasions in villages and towns in the eastern Delta of Egypt, until her final illness in Cairo in 1973. She recorded about three hundred songs. For almost forty years her monthly, Thursday night concerts were broadcast live over the powerful Egyptian radio waves. As a result, her audience consisted of millions, reaching far beyond the concert-going public of Cairo to households all over the Middle East where people gathered to listen to the broadcasts" (p. 1).