Category Archives: Musical

The Tradition of the Yiddish Yodel

Nationality: Jewish-American
Age: 58
Occupation: University Professor
Residence: Seattle, WA
Performance Date: 29 Mar 2018
Primary Language: English

“The ‘Yiddish Yodel’ was held in Deer Isle, Maine in the summer, usually in august at my parents house or their friends’ house. And there would be twenty to thirty guests, all Jews from New York who spend their summers up in Maine, most of them artists of one kind or another. I think it started because one evening a smaller group just started singing Yiddish songs, and then they had the idea that they should make it a yearly event, and then it just grew and grew and grew with more and more guests, unit finally they started printing out lyric sheets and, um, what else? At one point, they really did buy an organ to keep up there—one of those little electric organs—and they bought it specifically for Renee to play at the Yiddish Yodel. And they often looked to Renee for knowledge and inspiration. I’m not exactly sure why she remembered more Yiddish songs than anyone else, but she did. And she was also a preschool teacher so she was very keen on teaching everyone how to sing the songs.

“I don’t think it started out as a reenactment of a tradition in a conscious way, although Renee recently told me that when she was a child, in the summers, she and many other Jewish families who lived in New York would go up to the Catskills  to these bungalow colonies, and the moms and the kids would be up there all week, and the dad would come up on the weekends. And she said that on Saturday nights, they would all gather in the—there was some gathering hall, entertainment room or something—and they would recite Yiddish poetry and sing Yiddish songs. So I think now that she’s making that connection in a conscious way, but i don’t ever remember anyone saying anything about that when this started, But clearly, as soon as it started, people were very keen on turning it into its own tradition, even if they weren’t consciously linking it to an older experience in a direct way. They didn’t start recording these until later, when I wasn’t there for them anymore, so I don’t know how they decided—how or why they decided to start recording.

“It was just, like, bring as many chairs as you possibly could from everywhere into the house, into the living room, in, like, a rough circle. But really there was no order to it, and the living room wasn’t really big enough—either living room it ever happened in—wasn’t really big enough for them to really forma circle, so some people were sitting behind each other. When it started out it was much less formal, like, people would just—someone would start singing a song—and they’d finish that one and just be like, ‘oh, who remembers another song?’ And they would just sing the songs that they remembered. As it went on and it got bigger and bigger, it got more organized with Renee really leading songs and Bernie becoming like a master of ceremonies. You can hear that on the tapes. But when it started it was much less formal, it was just people getting together and trying to remember the songs. So it guess in that way it was trying to revive, not a specific tradition, but I guess a more general aspect of their culture.

“I bet they hadn’t really sung these songs in any sort of consistent way for… forty years. You know, some of them might have sung some of them… but it was probably forty years… they learned them in their childhood… and then, they didn’t all know exactly the same songs, so then they would start teaching them to each other and maybe someone would remember that ‘oh yeah, I did know that song.’”

Going through my family attic, I came across a box of tapes hand-labelled “Yiddish Yodel 1992-95.” They were recordings of a large gathering of people singing in Yiddish and Hebrew. I asked around to find out more, and although it seems only a couple of the original participants are still alive, one of their daughters gave me this detailed account.

Although the specific tradition of the “Yiddish Yodel” was a new one—created by this small community of Jewish artists in the 1980s. It was clearly a way to preserve much older traditions of folk music and language they feared were dying out, and was not the first attempt at this. In 1948, Ben Stonehill collected over one thousand songs from holocaust survivors in New York.

In the instance of the “Yiddish Yodel,” we see folk, communal, spontaneous origins. However as it progressed, we can see formalization and the development of a separation between active bearers (Renee and Bernie) and passive bearers (their friends).

Rockin, Rollin, Ridin!

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/7/18
Primary Language: English

Main Piece: KK: My mom used to sing this song to us, when we were falling asleep and stuff, and for the life of me I can’t ever figure out where it came from. She went: “Tommy’s at the engine, someone rings the bell, Sarah holds the lantern, to show that all is well, rockin rollin ridin, all along the rails, heading for morning town, many miles away.” It’s about a train, if you couldn’t tell, but I have no idea where she got that song, but she used to sing it!

 

Context: This song was sung as a lullaby when KK and her sister were young.

 

Background: KK’s mother learned this from her grandmother, who probably heard the version sung by The Seekers and turned it into a lullaby, much akin to “A Bushel and a Peck”, which is often used as lullabies as well.

 

Analysis: Turns out, upon research, this song is by The Seekers, and is called Morningtown Ride! So many people I saw said that their mother used to sing this song to them as a lullaby, so somewhere along the way this song turned into a typical lullaby. It is interesting to think about this alongside the issue of Simon and Garfunkel and their “folk” music, because even though this song was authored and created by a band and publicized, the fact that culture has taken it and turned it into a lullaby has changed it into a piece of folklore.

 

A Bushel and a Peck

Nationality: American
Age: 49
Occupation: Unemployed
Residence: Temecula
Performance Date: 4/8/18
Primary Language: English

Main Piece: CR: I always sang my daughter “a bushel and a peck”. I’m not entirely sure grandma sang it to me, but I’m gonna assume she did, and we sorta ended up having to make up our own words at the end of it because I don’t think we know what the real words are, but yeah so I sang it to my daughter, and my mom sang it to her too. Our version went, “I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck, a hug around the neck and a barrel and a heap, a barrel and a heap and I’m talking in my sleep about you.” I think grandma would sing it “a pocket full of sheep.”

 

Context: This song was sung to CR as a lullaby, and CR sung it to her daughter as a lullaby.

 

Background: CR and her husband raised their daughter with lullabies sung to her every night, because that’s how they were raised as well. This was the specific song sung to her daughter by her; her husband had a different song he would sing when he took her to bed.


Analysis: This song was originally published in 1950’s, and adopted as a part of the musical Guys and Dolls. CR’s mother probably learned it from that, or heard it on the radio one day, and started singing it to CR, who then remembered it as her childhood lullaby and passed it on to her daughter. The most interesting part of this story is that CR assumes her mother sang this to her– it may not have been! CR’s mother could very easily have sung a different lullaby, but because CR sang it to her daughter she so firmly accepts that her mother also sang it to her, because why else would she know it as a lullaby? This kind of ingrained idea is so fascinating to discover.

Chinese Folksong- Unknown Title

Nationality: Chinese American
Age: 18
Occupation: student
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: 04/10/2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Shanghai dialect
  1. The main piece: Chinese Folksong

Chinese Folksong- Unknown Title (attached)

  1. Background information about the performance from the informant: why do they know or like this piece? Where/who did they learn it from? What does it mean to them? Etc.

“Oh! When I was little, my grandma always made me sing this song about chickens! Or, it’s not about chickens. It’s about waking up in the morning and going to work. Okay, so when I was a kid, my mom was in med school, and my dad was in residency, and so I spent a lot of time w my grandparents and that’s probably why I know more about these traditions than my sister, because my parents had more time w her. I don’t know, I spent a lot of time with my grandpa and he taught me lots of songs and stuff.”

  1. The context of the performance

“No one else knows this song. My grandpa just pulled this out of nowhere. He’s the only one in my family from the countryside in China. My grandma and my other grandparents are from more urban places.”

  1. Finally, your thoughts about the piece

The fact that no one else knows this song, according to the informant at least, shows that this piece of folklore is inherent to a specific family or small group of people. It is a piece of roots music because learning the song from her grandfather allowed the informant to learn about where specifically he was from, and how he grew up—none of her other grandparents would be able to share this song because they were not rooted in the countryside like the informant’s grandfather.

  1. Informant Details

The informant is an 18-year old Chinese-American female. While she grew up in the southern California area, she spent more time with her grandparents than her parents growing up, and felt that learning their Chinese traditions and language was the main way she bonded with them, while her younger sister never had that experience because her parents were out of school by then.

Antakshari

Nationality: Indian American
Age: 50
Residence: United States
Performance Date: 04/22/2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Telugu, Hindi, Urdu
  1. The main piece: Antakshari

“Antakshari is like a song game, right? That we, it’s an Indian thing… uh… let me see. Uh, so what happens is, we sing a song. It’s a group thing, we used to play in the bus, on picnics, going somewhere, in the evenings. You start a song, let’s say it starts with the letter a.

[informant sings] “‘Aaja sanam, Madhur chandni me hum tum.’

“So tum means it ends in ‘m’. So you have to pick a song that starts with ‘m.’ These are all Bollywood songs, I guess. So it’s the Indian consonant that ends that syllable or whatever. So ‘m.’ Uh… [long pause] I can’t think of any songs. So, you can have any number of contestants or players, and typically we only sing the first verse of the song. And then whoever can sing whatever they know, and if you can’t think of it starting with their last syllable, you’re out of the game. Antakshari, it literally means last letter. Akshara means letter, anta means end.”

  1. Background information about the performance from the informant: why do they know or like this piece? Where/who did they learn it from? What does if mean to them? Etc.

“I mean, it’s—it’s—everyone plays it in India. So all my friends around me played it. It’s been there for generations. You play it with your family, you play it with friends, you play with classmates.”

  1. The context of the performance

“Anytime we went on picnics, we used to play this. Because it’s easy to play on the bus. Like kids on schoolbus, late at night during a bonfire or sitting outside, relaxing, people play this game.”

  1. Finally, your thoughts about the piece

This song game is an interesting combination of folk music and folk games. Since Bollywood songs are generally used, but are changed to fit the needs of the game, Antakshari can be seen as turning authored music into folk music—in fact, the game creates mashups, a form of folk music. Music is an easy way for people of all ages to bond when they have little else in common, and creating unique folk music mashups together during trips and parties clearly helped build a strong sense of community in the informant’s childhood.

  1. Informant Details

The informant is a middle-aged Indian-American female. She was born in India and grew up with her two sisters in a small town near a holy river in Andhra Pradesh, the Godavari River. After moving to the United States and raising her children there, she enjoyed reminiscing on her childhood in India and sharing stories of it with her children, so that they could see the differences in their upbringings and learn about their Indian heritage.

 

This game was actually adopted into an Indian television show from 1993 to 2007—this show was called Antakshari and was a musical game show. The following news article describes the show’s popularity and some of the main actors: https://www.hindustantimes.com/tv/antakshari-annu-kapoor-pallavi-joshi-share-memories-of-iconic-musical-show/story-JoOrFIY2UYIwhb6VhOIkEJ.html.