In the year 1909, two unrelated music recording sessions took place in two remarkable locations over five thousand miles apart. One session was held in Gyumri, a city in today’s Republic of Armenia which was then known as Alexandropol. The other was in New York City. From April to September 1909, the Gramophone Company of London sent sound expert Franz Hampe on a recording expedition spanning from the Caucasus to Central Asia¹. Labels such as Gramophone had recorded Armenian music and musicians as early as in 1902, if not earlier, throughout the Caucasus and the Ottoman Empire. The company had already established a regional office in Tbilisi (then Tiflis) and recorded Armenian musicians, such as Bagrat Bagramiants in 1903. On his 1909 journey, Hampe visited Gyumri and proceeded to document the voice of Gomidas Vartabed (Father Gomidas, 1869-1935) the renowned Armenian composer and musicologist. While Gomidas sang on one recording, his student the vocalist Vahan Ter-Arakelian would record numerous compositions by Gomidas for Hampe. While  around the same time, some 5, 590 miles westward to Gyumri, in New York City, a twenty-nine year old electrotyper named Mardiros Der Sarkis Tashjian would enter the recording studios of the Columbia Phonograph Company and document the Armenian language for the first time in the United States by recording a total of thirty four songs. Six of the recordings are solo compositions by Mardiros recorded in 1909, while the remaining twenty-eight songs feature he and his brothers Nishan and Levon recorded in 1910.  By focusing on the biographical sketches of the Der Sarkis Tashjian brothers, this article explores the first Armenian language commercially released recordings in America.