Career
He is particularly associated with the ṣawt genre called Ṣawt al-Khaleej ("Voice of the Gulf"). As a teenager, Suri worked on sailing ships plying the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. He first started as a maidan singer.
He learned ṣawt by listening to phonograph records of performances by Abdullatif al-Kuwaiti.
Continuing to travel widely, he became known as "The Singing Sailor". He consequently moved to Mumbai where he worked first as a boilerman, then as a mercantile broker and translator in the trade between Arab and Indian merchants.
During this time Suri continued to practice and perfect his musical art, integrating Indian influences into his music – some of his lyrics were in Urdu as well as his native Arabic, helping him secure a steady sale of his records (he recorded twelve 78 rpm shellac gramophone records in the early 1930s) to an Indian as well as an Arabic audience. He continued to be a leading creator and exponent of the Ṣawt al-Khaleej ("Voice of the Gulf") variety of ṣawt.
However, the advent of vinyl records ruined his record business and he returned to Oman in 1971 where the Sultan made him a consultant for cultural affairs
He died in 1979, considered by then a beloved cultural treasure of Oman.