Ten Years of the Blog YIDDISH SONG OF THE WEEK

• In Event: Digital & Oral Pedagogies

Abstract

Ten Years of the Blog YIDDISH SONG OF THE WEEK

In 2010, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in NYC launched the blog YIDDISH SONG OF THE WEEK to introduce rarely heard field recordings of Yiddish folksingers. This blog differs from other archival websites of Yiddish songs in that each song is presented with a translation, transliteration and yiddish transcription in addition to a commenatry on the history of the song and singer if that is possible. One of the aims of this project was to introduce "new old" yiddish songs into the repertory of singers. Another aim was to highlight recordings that were not of the highest audio quality and would therefore never make it onto a professional recording. In addition, since almost all the singers that appear on the blog sing acapella, which was the traditional performance style for Yiddish folksingers in Eastern Europe, the audience that would purchase a CD of such songs would be too small to make it worth one's while. Each song that is posted in the blog has an interesting story to tell, and a number of these stories shall be discussed to bring out the varied contexts of how the singers learned the songs.

Author

• Itzik Gottesman, University of Texas at Austin