In the aftermath of the shocking murder of Tunisian superstar Habiba Messika in 1930, demand for the musician’s records skyrocketed across the Maghrib. Her music––Andalusian, popular, nationalist, and Egyptian––not only crossed borders of genre and geography but so too, brought together a coalescing, cross-class Jewish and Muslim public in Tunisia and as far west as Morocco, who increasingly understood themselves in national terms. Messika’s cosmopolitan nationalism may have been without a political program but it certainly had a prominent stage. Alongside Messika, other North African musicians produced similarly diverse audiences during the interwar period. In Tunisia, for example, an observer described the spectators at one such concert in the capital as representing nothing less than “a complete fusion of all of the native social classes.” That Arabic-language music, both live and recorded, could have such an effect made the French colonial authorities ever more apprehensive about this sonic variant of anti-colonial nationalism. And while the Residents General in Morocco and Tunisia and Governor General in Algeria had initially celebrated the commercial music industry, their patience wore thin as efforts to stem the flow of border-crossing music proved near impossible. This paper follows the trajectories of a number of interwar Maghribi musicians, the paths of their records, and the contours of their audiences in order to rethink cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the greater Middle East. Indeed, if Middle Eastern historiography has tended to frame cosmopolitanism and nationalism as near opposites, then music as performed and consumed in North Africa surfaces a contesting vision of the nation in which the two were intertwined. In fact, while a number of scholars have suggested that cosmopolitanism in the region was solely a practice of the elite and one which was rarely expressed in Arabic, the reach of non-elite musicians like Messika and the range of her repertoire offer a critical rejoinder. Finally, this paper, which employs a varied archival and linguistic source base, engages with Will Hanley’s notion of “vulgar cosmopolitanism” or “ordinary cosmopolitanism” in order probe its applicability beyond Egypt while considering what Maghribi cosmopolitanism might have to offer scholars of the Mashriq.