What is a Yiddish folk song?

פֿאָלקסלידYiddish

A Yiddish folk song (פֿאָלקסליד) is a song that lived in people’s mouths: usually strophic, often anonymous or treated as traditional, sung in Yiddish for love, work, lullaby, or protest rather than for a play or a wedding set. Collectors later wrote them down; the folk revival sometimes filed theater songs here too, which is how Dona Dona got a second, folk-shaped life.

Ashkenazi communities sang far more than they danced. Beside the klezmer (כּלי־זמר) ’s instrumental set sat a huge sung repertoire — lullabies, ballads, workers’ songs — that Yiddishists and songbooks collected in the twentieth century. Some pieces began on the stage and were then sung as if they had always been folk (Theodore Bikel’s “Jewish folk songs” album is that shelf). This page keeps the distinction: folk is how a song lives, theater is how it was written. Dona Dona belongs on both sides of that line.