The recordings the app writes about. Each page lets you hear it, open it in the Piano Roll when we have an arrangement, and follow it back to its artists and the histories it belongs to.
Written by Sholom Secunda for a 1932 Yiddish musical that closed in a season; five years later the Andrews Sisters' English version became a worldwide hit — the Yiddish stage's greatest crossover.
Mamie Smith’s 1920 recording — the first blues hit by a Black artist. Its sales to Black buyers showed labels a market they had ignored, and they answered with a segregated catalog they called “race records.”
Benny Goodman Orchestra (as “And the Angels Sing”), 1939
“The quiet bulgar,” first recorded by Abe Schwartz's orchestra in 1918. Twenty years on, trumpeter Ziggy Elman's adaptation became Benny Goodman's #1 hit “And the Angels Sing” — a klezmer dance tune at the top of the American charts.
A 1940 Yiddish theater song — Aaron Zeitlin’s lyric, Sholom Secunda’s tune — about a calf bound for slaughter and a swallow that is free. The Shvesters sing it here in Yiddish; the English folk-revival life, “Donna, Donna,” has its own page.
The English “Donna, Donna” — Arthur Kevess and Teddi Schwartz’s translation of the Yiddish “Dona Dona,” which Joan Baez put on her 1960 debut and the folk revival made a standard.
“The hot bulgar” — Brandwein's May 1923 recording made this one of the best-known American klezmer tunes, and his ornament-drenched version is still the reference point.
Al Grand’s singable Yiddish of “Over the Rainbow.” This page plays Grand’s own recording from his YouTube channel next to Wolf Krakowski’s 2016 blues-rock version.
Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s ballad for The Wizard of Oz — Judy Garland as Dorothy, 1939. The studio nearly cut it; it became her signature, and later took Yiddish words.
Handy’s 1914 song, among the most-recorded of its era; the 1925 Bessie Smith / Louis Armstrong version pairs a blues voice with a jazz cornet in call-and-response.