Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Looking for a comprehensive list of Yiddish songs on Youtube captioned in English? Of course you are!

You know how the marketers say, "Go Niche" ?? Have I overdone it?

I've been concentrating on recording Yiddish songs of the 1920s and 1930s, the "Yiddish Jazz Age." And since they're full of jokes and most people don't speak Yiddish, I'm captioning the songs in animated videos on YouTube.

Click the picture to get to my playlist of Yiddish songs with English subtitles.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Concerts of Yiddish theater music in North Carolina


In connection with my years-long research project into rarely heard or almost extinct Yiddish theater songs from the 1920s and 1930s - and the two cds of the material we recorded this year - I've set up two concerts in December 2013 in the RTP area, in Durham NC and Chapel Hill / Carrboro NC.

The first show is on Thursday December 19, at 7:30 pm, at Carolina Meadows (100 Carolina Meadows, Chapel Hill, NC). This one hour concert features Jane Peppler (vocals, fiddle, concertina), Randy Kloko (vocals), Roger Spears (piano), and Ken Bloom (clarinet, domro, guitar). The show is one hour in length. Tickets are $5 in advance or at the door.

The second show is on Saturday, December 21, at 7:30 pm, at the ArtsCenter (300 E Main St, Carrboro, NC). Along with the four musicians mentioned above, the rest of world music band Mappamundi will be joining in - Jim Baird on acoustic bass and guitar, and Beth Holmgren on vocals - and also pianist Aviva Enoch. This show is 90 minutes long; tickets are $7 in advance or $10 at the door.

For more information and to buy tickets in advance, visit our Cabaret Warsaw website. Thanks! Here are some samples:



Thursday, January 17, 2013

Scary murder ballad: if you don't pay the guys who work for you, bad things may happen

Lamkin is a wonderful old story song about a "Lord of the Manor" who gets a castle built and then stiffs the mason and sails away leaving his wife, daughter, and baby behind to face the piper, so to speak. I loved putting this song together out of three separate versions of the tune and I loved writing about it. The Celtic duo the Pratie Heads (me and Bob Vasile) recorded this a couple years ago on our album "We Did It! (Songs of People Behaving Badly). You can hear it free at our Bandcamp site:

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Gift Ideas Social Marketing Community

Social Networking

Gift Ideas Community

A bunch of us from Squidoo and other places in the gift ideas niche have teamed up together to form a social marketing community to share our best gift ideas. Basically group HQ is our social hub that connects our outposts on G+, FB, Tumblr, Pinterest etc.

Because it's getting more and more difficult for the little guy to run with the big dogs online, there's more of a need than ever to form a tight active team to compete. Nowadays it's difficult to impossible for a single webmaster working on his/her own to rise to the top like cream.


Great gift ideas too!
Are you invested in the gift ideas niche? The Gift Metropolis Community just might be for you, and it's Squidoo friendly too! Join other good webmasters in getting more socially active and come share not only your resources but re-sharing, commenting on the best gift guides at the community from other members too, no schwag or spam please. Riff Raff spammers will be banned.

Once approved gift community members may share ideas with our gift ideas community on Google's new social network G+. Sharing gifts with the group may positively effect your Authorship authority at Google.  We also have an active gift ideas group community at Facebook and once approved for membership you can post your favorite gift ideas with the group. We also recommend sharing your gift ideas on our Tumblr featuring gifts for everybody. And of course we have a very nice gift ideas group over at Pinterest too.


Gift Ideas Community
Still reading? You must be interested, so please come over and take a look at our main base of operations which we call Gift Metropolis HQ. We have a nice gift ideas forum, cool social groups, and of course a gift ideas directory. I think your going to like it. If you decide you like it, and you agree to not only share your stuff but to generously share the gift ideas of other members also then please apply for membership, it's free.


Gift Metropolis


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Friday, January 4, 2013

Romantic songs in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino for Valentine's Day

Even though it's barely January, and there may be a lot of nasty weather before we get there, Valentine's Day is only one turn of the calendar page away. My band Mappamundi plays for Jewish weddings and over the years we've accumulated a lot of gorgeous love songs from Israel, the Sephardic tradition, and Yiddish folk and theater songs.

I put together a handful of the songs we've recorded on a page called Yiddish Love Songs and it points you to our band's record label, Skylark Productions, where you can listen to the songs all the way through!