«In 1950, Seeger and his vocal quartet "The Weavers" hit the charts with "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena," an arrangement of a Hebrew song written in 1941 by Issachar Miron (born Stefan Michrovsky in Poland) and Yechiel Chagiz. The original lyrics went, "Go out, go out, go out, girls, and see soldiers in the moshava (farming community)." In the Weavers' version, the words describe joining a celebration, dancing a hora, and otherwise feting the new statehood of Israel. Then, in key moments for the assimilation and acceptance of Israel in American culture, Lee Hays, the Arkansas-born cavernous bass singer of the Weavers, would step forward and warn the audience that they would be hearing the original words in Hebrew. Seeger, slim as a whippet in middle age, would step forward picking at a banjo and in a New England cracker-barrel accent, sing the folksiest Hebrew imaginable.Pete Seeger's Yiddishkeit – Forward.com
Seeger was backed by two other singers in the Weavers who were born closer to the idiom: Ronnie Gilbert (born 1926) a creamy-voiced contralto with the earth mother quality of a soloist in a Slavic choir, natural enough considering that her parents were East European immigrants, garment workers who settled in New York City. The fourth member of the Weavers was Fred Hellerman, born in Brooklyn in 1927 to a Latvian Jewish family. Of the Weavers, Hellerman would have the most lasting artistic ties with Jewish culture, later conducting two hit albums, "Theodore Bikel Sings Jewish Folk Songs" (1958) and "Theodore Bikel Sings More Jewish Folk Songs" (1959). It was Hellerman who suggested the group's name, after a 19th century play by the German author Gerhart Hauptmann about an 1840s uprising by Silesian weavers worried about being replaced by mechanization during the Industrial Revolution.f»
http://m.forward.com/articles/191792/pete-seegers-yiddishkeit
Kol Tuv,
RRW
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