Prince Mohammed Mohiuddin (1892-1967) is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth-century in the Republic of Turkey and throughout the Arab world. A multi-instrumentalist, he was a performer of both Western and Ottoman classical music on the cello and oud (al-‘ūd). Hailing from the Hashemite bloodline, his father Ali Haidar Pasha was the last Ottoman Emir of the Hejaz and the holy city of Mecca. Although Mohiuddin spent most of his life living between Baghdad and Istanbul, it is less commonly known that much of his early career was in New York City, 1924-1932, where he moved after the establishment of the modern Turkish republic. This paper explores the social networks that shaped Prince Mohiuddin’s American career, as he capitalized upon his identity as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad from the city of Mecca while performing in live concerts to North Ameircan elites, record companies, and one of the first radio broadcasts intended to introduce American audiences to non-Western music. It suggests that his goal of popularizing the oud in the United States contended with emerging notions of “global” culture propelled by early American entertainment industries, which propagated orientalist tropes, as well as the supposed universality of the Western arts. The 1920s in the United States, aptly known as the roaring twenties, was a watershed decade for media and entertainment industries. New technologies like the radio propagated an increasing variety of musical styles to American audiences, providing novel presentations of musical culture not only from within the United States but also around the world. A global community of musicians trained in European classical music had also congregated in New York City and performed for radio, Prince Mohiuddin among them. Yet while the global import of European art music was often equated with the “universality” of music itself, media industries also propagated musical entertainments founded on ideas of racial and cultural difference. Themes of a timeless Orient were increasingly popularized in American consumer culture, no less a proper noun than “Mecca” becoming a metaphor for consumer destinations, which established catchy marketing tropes for music and a host of other products during the early twentieth century. Prince Mohiuddin navigated the extremes of these poles within the entertainment industry as a musical and social virtuoso, while he participated in shaping and challenging the emerging American consciousness, both scholarly and popular, of Middle Eastern musical culture.