Woody Guthrie’s Hanukkah Songs: Old Wine in New Vessels

There is a recent American tale of old wine in new vessels,  a part of  our national folklore revealing that Woody Guthrie composed Hanukkah songs. In a 2003 concert  the Klezmatics, a popular Grammy Award winning Klezmer band, performed Hanukkah songs that showcased a selection from the many lyrics written from 1949 through the early 1950s by Woody Guthrie, the iconic American folk troubadour and songwriter. The lyrics had laid fallow and long forgotten in Guthrie’s archives until their discovery in 1998 by Woody’s daughter, Nora Guthrie. Nora asked the Klezmatics to write original music for the lyrics, which fuses strains of Klezmer music with American folk and bluegrass. The 2006 album, “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanuka,” comprises many different songs, including “Happy, Joyous Hanuka” and “Hanuka Tree.” Two of the eight songs, “The Many And The Few” and “Hanuka Dance,” had lyrics and melodies penned entirely by Guthrie. The songs were in part biographical. Woody was married to Marjorie Mazia, a Jewish dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company who was the daughter of Aliza Greenblatt, an activist and Yiddish poet. Nora remembers “For Hanukkah actually, we had a hat—we didn’t get presents—but we had a hat with different amounts of Hanukkah gelt, and every night we’d pick out five cents or twenty-five cents of gelt. My mother played piano, and we used to sing and dance every night.”[i]

At the 2003 debut concert with the Klezmatics at the 92^nd Street Y in Manhattan, folk legend Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son and Nora’s brother, joked that as children they would dance “around the Hanukkah tree.” Happy Joyous Hanuka” counts down each candle on the menorah (“Seven for the sons of Hannah that died/Six for kings and the tricks they tried/Five for the brothers Maccabee”), while “Hanuka Tree” has a lively simple melody (“Round and around my Hanukah tree/Round and around I go/Round and around my Hanukah tree/Because I love you so”). According to Nora, most of Woody Guthrie’s Hanukkah songs seem to be written within November or December within five days of each other “because he had  bookings in December for children’s Hanukkah parties in assorted Brooklyn community centers.”  As was his wont, Woody would “write songs only for the gig a few days before and then go on to other songs for other gigs.” For the Guthrie family, a family of improvisers not of traditions and for whom the approach to religion was “all or none”, the tree was a “Christmas tree, a Hanukkah tree, and a holiday tree. It was a fluid thing!”

Indeed, the popularization of Woody Guthrie’s Hanukkah songs by the Klezmatics demonstrates the vital role that music plays as an  intrinsic cultural force  contributing to the  Americanization of this Jewish holiday (coexisting  side by side with  Christmas)

 

[i] Telephone interview with Nora Guthrie, August 17, 2011.

 

“Matishayu and Maccabeats: A New Spin on Hanukkah Music!”

My wife less than fondly remembers about singing in the Christmas concerts of the 1970s at her grammar school in a small town in rural southeastern Connecticut. “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” was a sparse offering and an accommodation to the few Jews in the audience. After looking at recent Hanukkah music offerings, we’ve certainly come a long way!

Before we move on, it is worth noting that “I Had a Little Dreidel” reached near universal status. So popular was “The Dreidel Song” that people thought it was an unattributed folk song. Its origin is with Eastern European Jewish entertainers who wrote many Hanukkah songs in Yiddish, which were then reissued in English to great success. The Yiddish and English versions were composed in 1930 by Mikhl Gelbart and Samuel Goldfarb (supervisor for the entertainment department at the New York Bureau of Education) and the lyrics for both are by Samuel S. Grossman. Grossman adapted the lyrics to English with very little change, except that the Yiddish version had the dreidel made out of lead (Yiddish blay, leading scholars to believe that the Yiddish lyrics preceded the English) while the English version describes it as being made out of clay.

So where are we today?

Recently released, “Happy Hanukkah,” is a new reggae song by Matishayu, the proceeds of which through December 16th (the end of Hanukkah) will benefit the victims of Hurricane Sandy. See happyhanukkah.matishayuworld.com

The Klezmatics, a popular Grammy Award winning Klezmer band, performed Hanukkah songs that showcased a selection from the many lyrics written from 1949 through the early 1950s by Woody Guthrie, the iconic American folk troubadour and songwriter. The result was the 2006 album, “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanuka,” comprising many different songs, including “Happy, Joyous Hanuka” and “Hanuka Tree.” This album gets a gold star! It is phenomenal!!! See http://www.klezmatics.com.

Let’s not forget YouTube sensation “Candlelight” featuring the Maccabeats, an all-male A Cappella singing group from Yeshiva University in New York City. In “Candlelight,” the Maccabeats parody of the music of the hip-hop song “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz, the lyrics reference latkes, candles and a telling of the Hanukkah story. Completely captivating, I have watched clusters of young kids of all ethnicities singing this song on the streets of New York City. see http://www.maccabeats.com

So Get Rockin’ With Hanukkah!