Researching Yiddish penny songs (tenement song broadsides of theater and variety show songs, 1895-1925)
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Youtube: all the Penny Songs I've recorded so far (with subtitles)
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List of the still-lost songs: do you know any of them?
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Continuing on my jag of uploading vintage recordings to Youtube, here is the wonderful Abraham Moscowitz (I sang one of his songs on the Polish Jewish Cabaret blog: I won't go thieving any more.

Sadly there is no information about the song on the songsheet, perhaps Moscowitz wrote it himself. You can find the song under the title "Der Tag Was Geht Avek" on the FAU site. It was recorded for Columbia in New York in 1917. It was printed a second time, on a second broadside, under the title "Di fargangenheyt"

Click below to hear him singing the mystery song:


Below, the songsheet (click for a larger view). It has a third verse that Moscowitz doesn't sing, my translation is below. I can't tell if the "miracle" the doctor wrought was medical or carnal.


The past can never be totally forgotten
Everyone must remember it at least once.
No matter if it was good or bad, it won't come back.
It often makes a person, a weak creature, shed a tear.
There's just one consolation, that frees us --
When we say, "What's the point of remembering? What's past is gone."

Because the day that passes never comes again
And everything that was, is gone.
The world is an empty dream, a teacher,
It goes away one, two, three.
Therefore a clever person should know all this,
And completely use every moment,
And enjoy everything he has, yes,
Because the day that passes never comes again.

A chaste old woman fasts twice a day, but listen,
In the eyes of the old creature I plainly read what she's thinking
When I was a young wife and had a husband,
I lay quietly as a dove -- and when he used to be away from home
My beloved Shmuel Katay stood by my window...
But what's the point of that memory? What's past is gone.

There sits a rich landlady, Broydye, and she rocks her beloved son,
And by the cradle the lady thinks of that beautiful city, Vienna,
And of the doctor, his miracle... it can't be understood
If it weren't for him, never in her lifetime would she have seen any children,
She wasn't long in Vienna - only two months, April and May,
But what's the point of remembering this - what's past is done.

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For sheet music and/or performances contact me: jane@mappamundi.com

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Labels: mores, nostalgia