The Korea Herald has an interesting (if factually challenged) story about older Korean music in this recent article about the 1950s singer Moon Kim. I just wish they did a bit more research before going to print.
The KH story claims that a local professor “discovered” Moon Kim’s 1956 record “East of Make Believe,” making the first known recording of a Korean artist in the West earlier than previously known. Worst, the article calls this “hallyu”, which is just silly.
A quick bit of Googling shows that people have known about this record for some time (and it is a record, not an album). Here is an eBay auction of “East of Make Believe” from a couple of months ago, and there are several others out there.
Still, her story is pretty fascinating. Moon Kim was the performance name of Ok Doo-ok, a singer who got her start in the 1940s in Korea. In the late 1940s, she emigrated to America, where she either studied music at Juilliard or journalism (or both … I’ve seen different reports). She released some songs for RCA in 1956 and 1957, but not much came of it and RCA dropped her after a couple of years. Then she worked for Voice of America for a bit, before starting several restaurants around the United States in the 1960s, creating a line of skin creams in the 1980s, and working with Korean orphans. She passed away in 2008.
Here’s a video of Ok/Kim singing on Korean TV in 1990:
And here is a video of her 1957 song “Oriental Hop”:
