Researching Yiddish penny songs (tenement song broadsides of theater and variety show songs, 1895-1925)
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Transliterated as Hit eich and Hit aich meidelach (Girls beware), the song was published in 1922. Music Sholom Secunda, lyrics Anshel Shorr, who wrote the show it was from: An oyg far an oyg (An Eye for an Eye).

As usual, a girl who does not stay home quietly obeying her mother ends up in the hospital. The wages of sin...

In the show, Dora Weissman sang the song, but on this unfortunately awful sounding 78 it's sung by the magnificent William Schwartz. Hit aykh, meydelekh!


When I was just a child, I remember as if it were today,
I used to run around every minute with boys, playing in the street.
Laughing, fooling around, it wasn't nice.
That's what I've always been drawn to.
And sometimes I went to the movies and mother didn't know.
And when I went home, exhausted, so tired,
She sat me on her lap and sang me this song:

Girls, if life is dear to you, don't run around after a "good time"
Girls, protect yourselves as from fire. Kids, don't run away from home.
Girls, don't run along the evil path, because the shock will be too much for you.
Don't sell your innocence, girls, protect it like the eyes in your head.

I knew a girl, Rose, from a very respectable home,
She fell in love with a charlatan who promised to be her husband.
Her mother didn't like him. She ran away from home with him.
He promised her a wedding and seduced her. It was terrible.
Now she's lying sick in the hospital with a high fever.
And her mother hears how her feverish child sings a sad song:

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

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Labels: battle between the sexes, morality, mores, mother, nostalgia, womens rights