Like many other societies, minorities practiced Iranian music disproportionately. While Muslim liturgical singing and preaching were not known as music, a big portion of entertaining musicians were religious minorities, such as Jews and Armenians, or ethnic minorities and nomads. For those minorities, music was a shameful disgrace, and they often switched to other careers to eliminate the ignominy often attached to musicians. Nevertheless, minorities throughout Iran made immense contributions to the nation’s music history, and have been remembered in different, and often uneven, ways. Morteza Neidavoud (1900-1990) was born to an Iranian Jewish family. He learned music from the masters of his time, Agha Hoseyn-qoli and Darvish Khan. Thanks to Ezra Meir Hakkak, a Jewish firm based in Iran and Iraq, the young Morteza dominated the first recording session of Persian music after WWI. In 1940, Radio Tehran was established and Morteza Neidavoud became a leading musician in live radio performances. The Iranian music scene changed dramatically after WWII, and Iranian traditional music was marginalized for several years by more popular music genres. These changes brought Morteza Neidavoud’s music career to an end. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, he left Iran and lived the rest of his life in California. His last public performance was in Los Angeles in 1984, at the age of 84. Of all of Morteza Neidavoud’s many recordings in the 1920s and 1930s, Morgh-e Sahar (The Bird of Dawn) has become the most iconic, travelling far beyond the borders of Iran. Owed to its social justice themes, the song became an anthem of the protests against the Islamic regime after the 1979 revolution. Morgh-e Sahar reintroduced Morteza Neidavoud to Iranians, and this time, being musician was an honor. In addition, since protest was against the Islamic regime, Neidavoud’s Jewish background helped his popularity. By looking at the life and the legacy of Morteza Neidavoud, this paper attempts to reflect on how the social meaning of music and musicianship has changed in Iran over the twentieth century. This presentation considers Neidavoud’s social status in three moments: his emergence as a popular musician in the early twentieth century, his initial reemergence as a national icon in the 1970s, and his second re-emergence as a protest icon in the early twenty-first century. In comparing these moments, I interrogate the values of, and in, music for musicians and the audience, and how these values change over time.