Yiddish Song of the Week

I'm pretty excited about the website "The Yiddish Song of the Week." I'm pretty excited about it. If the first, and only so far, blog post sets the tone this should be a fun ride. The blog post offered a quick biographical sketch of Yiddish folksinger Lifshe Schaechter Widman (1893-1973), as well notes, lyrics, and a lovely recording of her singing "Fintster Glitshik". Here's the official blurb....

Welcome to the website/blog “The Yiddish Song of the Week” presented by the An-sky Jewish Folklore Research Project (AJFRP). This initiative is part of a larger effort by the AJFRP to revitalize traditional Yiddish folksinging performance and research on the subject. To that end, this website will emphasize field recordings of traditional Yiddish folksingers from around the world contributed by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, musicians, singers and collectors.

Each Yiddish song will be presented with Yiddish words and translation, along with commentary from the contributor. Since the website is a blog, we hope that each song contribution will elicit comments from others on the song itself, or on the singing style of the singer. Perhaps others will contribute a variant of the song from their recordings, etc.

I'm pretty excited about this. Blogs like this are an important tool for expanding our communities awareness of this largely hidden treasure. There is increasing interest in expanding the range of performed Yiddish song. (Not to mention interest in increasing the amount of spoken Yiddish, but that's a different challenge.) So go check out this blog and stay tuned. It looks like more good stuff to come.

Here are a few of my favorite contemporary Yiddish singers. These folks are all amazing and bring a lot of energy to Yiddish song. In fact, maybe the An-sky Jewish Folklore Research Project should match their historical Yiddish Song of the Week with a "New Yiddish Song of the Week" website.

• Wolf Krakowski - Americana / roots music
• Lori Cahan Simon - Classic Yiddish folk and art music repertoire
• Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird - Contemporary Yiddish socialist anarchist cabaret
• Golem - Klezmer. Follow them on Twitter for 'Yiddish word of the week'
• Zahava Seevald. Contemporary Yiddish art music
• Lipa Schmeltzer. Funktastic Chassidic shiny-shoe singer.