KLEZMANIA:

Woody Guthrie's Hanukkah songs: Dust Bowl balladeer had ties to Judaism (AP, 12/06/04)

Woody Guthrie was a dust bowl drifter, a guitar strummer and a proto-folkie who wrote enduring songs about America's workers and underdogs.

He also was a longtime New York City resident who relished Jewish culture and wrote pages of unpublished lyrics about Hanukkah, Jewish history and spirituality.

That "other" Guthrie is now in the spotlight, decades after his death.

A batch of his Jewish lyrics has been dusted off, set to music and recorded by the Klezmatics, a New York City band that puts its unique spin on traditional Jewish klezmer music. The recently released "Happy Joyous Hanuka" CD includes loopy lines about dancing around the Hanukkah tree and a serious treatment of the Jews' bloody history.

Arlo Guthrie, who's joining the Klezmatics to perform the songs in concert, said they show his father's musical vision was broader than the Great Plains and freight trains. Woody Guthrie, it seems, was equally comfortable writing about Tom Joad or Judah Maccabee. [...]

Nora Guthrie remembers seeing Jewish-themed lyrics in the archive. But she never thought much about them until about six years ago as she listened to a concert by the Klezmatics and violinist Itzhak Perlman at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.

The songs were in Yiddish, and her thoughts floated to Greenblatt -- her "Bubbie" (Yiddish for "grandmother") -- scratching her back and singing her to sleep as a child. She only found out later she was listening to songs by her own grandmother.

Giving new thought to her dad's Jewish lyrics, she asked the Klezmatics to record them.

Setting a legend's words to music can be intimidating -- like being asked to spruce up old John Lennon lyrics. But Klezmatics' trumpeter Frank London said the lyrics were inspiring too. He especially loved the sense of Coney Island Guthrie evoked through lines like "where the halvah meets the pickle, where the sour meets the sweet."

"His words are really easy to set to music, because there's always a rhythm to them," London said. "There's always something to latch on to."

The Klezmatics' Hanukkah CD is be the first of two. Songs on the next CD will touch on broader spiritual and historic themes.

It's not the easiest thing in the world to find good Hanukkah cds.

MORE:
Happy Chanukah 2004 (Elliott Simon, 2004-12-02, All About Jazz)

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 17, 2004 7:27 AM