Abstract
Folk songs, which are one of the anonymous folk culture products, are linguistic productions that the people tell about themselves and keep their culture alive, form a branch of cultural transmission in ensuring continuity between generations, and play a major role in reflecting the national culture with their stories, words and tunes. In the preservation of Turkish culture, the compilers of folk songs are as important as those who produce and sing. The compilation of folklore products was considered for the phenomenon of national identity, which was desired to be built with the effect of the Turkism movement that emerged in the 1900s, and compilation activities were carried out in line with this purpose. One of the few researchers who started folklore studies before the Republican period is Sait Ugur. Purpose of the study; It is to determine Sait Ugur's understanding of compilation and to determine the density of the topics covered in the folk songs, by emphasizing the subjects of the folklore products that he compiled from the Içel region, and to reveal the accumulation of the social memory in this way. Another aim of the study is to contribute to the database of folk songs that a researcher working in the context of folklore can benefit from. In the study, the sources on which Sait Ugur published his folk song compilations were determined, the songs that were written and composed by himself and their variants were extracted, and the anonymous ones were analyzed with a text-centered method, independent of their tunes. One hundred and seventy folk songs, in which the subject density can be determined, were evaluated under the headings and as a result of the evaluation, the themes of homelessness-separation-longing, love-affection, praise and desire-wish were more prominent than other subjects in Sait Uğur's folk song compilations. It was seen that homelessness-separation-longing theme took the first place. In the study, based on the fact that the folk songs with the theme of homelessness-separation- longing rank first among the folk song compilations of an amateur compiler Sait Uğur, it was concluded that the sorrow, which was born in the regions where the nomadic communities where the compilations were made, deeply affected the society and played a major role in the shaping of the folk songs.