Re: Online song database (Was: barry sisters)

[Mark H. David <mhd...>]

At 7:32 PM -0500 11/15/98, Joel Bresler wrote:
>Chevra,
>
>This database was previously unknown to me. Are there others on the net
>that anyone can point me to? The web page terms it a "Yiddish Song
>Database", while in fact it has Ladino (and presumably other languages) as
>well.

Raphael Finkel created, and named, the "Yiddish Song Database" as a
web-based front end to a database created by Robert Freedman.  This
database in turn records the contents of the private collection that became
the Robert and Molly Freedman Archive of Jewish Music at the University of
Pennsylvania.

So, anyhow, it is now officially known as an archive of "Jewish", not just
Yiddish, music.

This was originally the private collection by Robert Freedman.  As far as I
know, he set out to collect every recording of Yiddish music.  I don't know
to what extent he did or didn't seek to include other languages, but since
Yiddish music is found on recordings with music in other languages, even if
he'd wanted to, he could not have avoided getting Ladino, Hebrew, English,
Russian, etc.

(If Bob Freedman had just collected the recordings, dayenu!  But to so
meticulously record every item in a database, including the feat of
encoding Hebrew-alphabet data when there wasn't any supported way of doing
this, well it just fills me with awe and wonder!)

The web site for the Robert and Molly Freedman Archive of Jewish Music is:

http://www.library.upenn.edu/friends/freed/

Unfortunately, I don't know of anything quite like The Yiddish Song
Database on the net.  Seems there ought to be more things like this coming
out of libraries by now.

Mark David