[HANASHIR:14630] Yes, I go back to the 50's....and international folk songs

[JAH29 <JAH29...>]

Dear Jackie et al,
       I don't often respond to the list since I'm fairly new to it but this 
- pardon the pun - touched a chord.  Pardon my length....
       Having graduated from both HS and college in the 50s (if I'd gone to 
Antioch College, which my parents couldn't afford, I'd have been there a couple 
of years before Joan Baez), the folk music I was weaned on was, first, our 
own.  I knew "Rebbe Elimelech" and songs of the chalutzim ('anu banu atza' 
songs) before "Wimoweh".  
       My dad played 7 instruments, 3 professionally, and played his way 
through medical school in dinner orchestras, dance bands, klezmer groups doing 
Chassidishe weddings, vaudeville orchestra pits.... you name it.  I went to 
sleep 
hearing Rumanian doinas, Russishe shers and "When Rebecca Came Back from 
Mecca" (very funny and my later folk song audiences loved it, but it isn't very 
apt right now!)  Having a lady from County Cork living with us to work in Dad's 
office meant that I was also well versed in "The Harp That Once Thru Tara's 
Halls" and others like it.  We skipped "Bold Fenian Men" out of good sense.
       Certainly Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives and even five years of 
Girl Scout camp and the G.S. book, "The Ditty Bag" (now out of print) et al 
had a great influence and, later, Baez, herself.  My husband came to our 
marriage in 1958 with fado records of Amalia Rodrigues (I love to sing fado) 
and of 
Marais and Miranda from South Africa.  At that point we also were still 
singing songs of the Spanish Civil War.  At last, I graduated from my college 
baritone ukelele to a 1960s Goya.
       Jerry Silverman did a great service to budding folk singers with his 
hootenany collections and Theo Bikel with his book.  There were early Israeli 
singers like Yaffa Yarkoni and my favorite, Nama (later Helena) Hendel.  In 
Israel in 1968, I accidentally "cooked" one of her records in a car window and 
had to buy a second one.  The record cover on the first we framed and hung on 
the wall.
       My joy, while performing for more than 20 years, was to gather 
international songs from people I met and have them give me the correct 
pronounciations into my tape recorder.  I followed my Hungarian cheese shop 
man, a Sho'ah 
survivor, around his shop as he sang.  I'm still kicking myself that, years 
ago, I didn't have my tape recorder in St. Malo, Brittany, as a group of 
elderly 
people sang in Celtic Breton.
       I'm glad to see all of these replies about my own formative era.  
Although I was in Westchester County for HS, I may know one or two people that 
you 
were in school with, Jackie, at the High School of Music and Art.  How I 
aspired to be at least slightly hippie-ish in the 1950s and wear black fishnet 
stockings and ballet slippers down-at-heel or buffalo leather sandals with toe 
loops.  However, except for school vacation forays into Greenwich Village, I 
was 
on the Canadian border at New York's Potsdam State Teachers College and of 
the saddle shoes and grey flannel Bermuda shorts or poodle skirt and Orlon 
sweater set set.
       Thanks, all, for the memories.  Off to my big (number not stated) high 
school reunion this August.  Perhaps I'll meet some of you at CAJE.
       Julie (Hirsch)
       Para Rabbinic Fellow and cantorial soloist
       Congregation Mickve Israel
       Savannah, GA