November 20th, 2024, 7:00 pm - 8:15 pm
The recoding of the class session is at https://youtu.be/k6T-jIrgMb4
The www.HenrySapoznik.com website has loads of interesting materials on Yiddish, especially for music and films. In particular if you enter “Larue” in the search box, you’ll find recordings of two of Cantor Thomas Larue’s songs with very good sound quality in the OKeh 14079: The 1923 Thomas LaRue recording blog.
There’s a Tablet Magazine article and a BBC program on Larue based on Henry’s research:
There’s also interesting material in the chat file from the class session. You can access it at
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/14U8QoKGk5SMdQywNSRRey1vaNCsGYgOe
The history of Black-Jewish cultural interaction primarily focuses on how Jews adopted and adapted Black vernacular music — ragtime, jazz, swing, R&B and blues, etc. —as performers, promoters, managers, club owners and record labels. However, what has never before been explored were the African Americans who performed Yiddish and cantorial music in and for the Jewish community, in theaters on records, radio and in concert between the World Wars. The talk will honor the memory of now forgotten Black cantors – Mendele der Shvartzer Khazn, Reb Dovid Kalistrita, Abraham Ben Benjamin Franklin, Thomas LaRue Jones and Goldye di Shvartze Khaznte the first – and only — Black woman cantor. The talk will feature dozens of historic graphics and translations of period Yiddish newspaper previews, ads and reviews and the playing of the one known 1923 Yiddish and Hebrew recording of Thomas Jones LaRue.
Klezmer historian Henry Sapoznik is an award-winning author, producer of radio and records and performer of traditional Yiddish and American music. A five-time Grammy nominated performer/producer, his NPR series the Yiddish Radio Project won the prestigious 2002 Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. His upcoming book is The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City, from Excelsior Editions (2025).
Henry is a native Yiddish speaker and child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in an Orthodox home and attended Lubavitch Yeshiva and Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin. He was the founding director of the sound archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York from 1982 to 1995. While at YIVO, he founded and directed the internationally acclaimed KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program that ran annually from 1983 through 2014.
Henry has been on over fifty records including having reissued over 30 anthologies of Yiddish, jazz, old-time, cantorial, ragtime, blues, Italian, swing, blackface minstrelsy and bluegrass recordings. You can find more information about him and his works at www.HenrySapoznik.com and find music and books by him at www.Amazon.com and at your local bookstore or online.
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