Playlist
* The Many and the Few The Klezmatics 6:20
* Hanukkah Dance Woody Guthrie 1:24
Music notes
The Many and the FewThis song is an account of the history of the establishment of the Jewish people’s annual Hanukkah Festival, but it begins much earlier than that - in 538 BCE when King Cyrus of Babylon ended the Hebrew people’s captivity and allowed them to return to their homeland, bringing their sacred book the Torah with them.
Later, the kingdoms of Judea and Israel were again conquered, this time by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. Upon his death, the Hellenized (i.e., living in accordance with Greek culture) Macedonian Empire was broken up, and the Jewish homeland soon fell under the control of the Seleucid dynasty based in Syria. At first, the Seleucids continued Alexander’s policy of permitting religious and cultural diversity in the conquered lands, but about 150 years later the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes began to issue decrees to homogenize the empire. He forbade Jewish religious practices, and required the people to adopt Greek culture and religion.
Many of the Jewish people, especially those in positions of power and wealth, accepted conversion to Hellenism, but there was also resistance. In 167 BCE, after an unsuccessful Jewish revolt, Antiochus re-conquered Jerusalem and converted its Temple to a a place for the worship of Zeus. This led to a successful uprising, initially led by an elderly rural priest called Mattathias, and then by his son Judah “The Hammer” Maccabee. The song recounts some of the early battles of that uprising.
One of the early successes of that revolution was a reconquering of Jerusalem and its Temple, but now we’re getting into the part of the story that you probably already know. If you don’t, well, that story is greatly abbreviated in the last four verses of this song.
Here is where the story gets interesting. This song was written and recorded by Woody Guthrie in or before 1949. Woody was not Jewish himself but he got a crash course in Judaism when he began dating and then marrying Marjorie Greenblatt and promised that their children would grow up in the Jewish religion and culture. Marjorie’s mother was a prominent poet, songwriter, and leader in New York’s Coney Island hotbed of Jewish culture and political activism. Woody got along great with his mother-in-law and her friends; he and Marjorie moved to a house on Mermaid Street across from hers.
I could go on and on about Woody’s family and his acceptance into the core of that neighbourhood’s Jewish cultural and political community, but I have already done that. If you want to learn more I suggest that you read my essay about it in my Dec 6, 2021 post.
This rendition of the song is by The Klezmatics. It is from their 2005 album Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah.
Hanukkah Dance This song is Woodys own recording of another Hanukkah song that he wrote. It was found by the Smithsonian Museum archivists among the documents and master discs that were donated to them by Moses Ashe, the founder and proprietor of the legendary recording company Folkways Records. Unlike Woody’s own recording of The Many and the Few, they do not know when this track was recorded. It might have been during the same session as that song (Dec 29, 1949) or it may have been earlier.
Since the song is so short and stops so abruptly, it might not have been intended to be a full song for Woody’s intended album of Hanukkah songs; a project that was never completed. Perhaps it was a sound check for The Many and the Few or one of Woody’s other Folkways recordings, or a demo to show the range of songs that could go on his proposed Hanukkah album. It does provide a contrast to the seriousness of The Many and the Few. Those two tracks are the only Hanukkah songs that Woody ever recorded, although lyrics for other Hanukkah songs that he wrote for the proposed album were found by his family in his notebooks.
To me, this sounds like the kind of song a father might improvise to spur on a laughing and dancing toddler or very young child. Both the family and the Smithsonian archivists think that it was probably written for Woody and Marjorie’s daughter Cathy, who was born in February 1943 but died tragically in a house fire at the age of four years old. The cause was an electrical malfunction in the family’s radio. As you can imagine, the event deeply affected both Woody and Marjorie.
Woody suffered a serious depression from his grief, especially because that was not the first time that fire had caused a family tragedy for him. Little Cathy’s death is often cited as a turning point towards Woody’s deteriorating mental and physical health in the following years, prior to the onset of the symptoms that accompanied his final extended deterioration from genetically-inherited Huntington’s Disease. But despite his grief, Woody continued to write songs and stories based on his memory of that lively little daughter, as well his interactions with other children.
If this was recorded in 1949 or later, the dancing child might have been Arlo, but the song itself might still originally have been inspired by Cathy. I know from my experience with my own daughters that family ditties I made up for Gillian often got recycled when singing to Wendy.
You can hear a much longer version of this song by the Klezmatics on my Dec 5, 2021 post. In it, Lorin Sklamberg, the lead singer, adds additional lyrics from a Woody manuscript, and in the last half he seems to be giving shout-outs to the children of the band members and their entourage. In the context of Woody’s loss of little Cathy, the tenderness of that version always brings both a tear to my eye as well as a smile to my face. The tone of this recording by Woody seems to be set by his little laugh in the first verse.
Want to learn more about Hanukkah?
I spent many years collecting Hanukkah songs and tunes to make a Hanukkah music album to be one of my Bill’s Sampler CDs. Hanukkah music, and Hanukkah itself, was a subject about which I had previously known next to nothing. As I came to appreciate the music I began to envision it as being a theme I could occasionally intersperse with usual Christmas music samplers, as I had done with Winter Solstice music.
But that was not to be. It was only two years after my Bill’s 2019 Hanukkah Music Sampler that I recognized that my years of using CDs as my medium to convey this music to people had come to an end, just as my five years of putting them on cassette tapes had ended 20 years earlier.
But, as a silver lining for that dark cloud, the space limitations of fitting my research into printed liner notes had always meant holding back a lot of things I learned from my research that I wanted to tell. As you have seen, these online message do not impose a length-limit on my writing. In 2021 I wrote three essays on the history and evolution of Hanukkah that I think are pretty good:
1. Nov 25, 2021 Hanukkah’s history Part 1 - Rebellion, rededication, and an eight-day celebration of gaining freedom from foreign rule. Song: Chanukah Light from Oil for the Lamps, a folk opera.
2. Dec 1, 2021 Hanukkah’s history Part 2 - Talmudic reinterpretation of the meaning of the festival, oil, and becoming a Festival of Light. Songs: Three Hanukkah classics; Banu Choshech, the Candle Blessings, and Ocho Kandelikas.
3. Dec 3, 2021 Hanukkah’s history Part 3 – Transformation for new times; becoming more celebratory and family-focused. Songs: Hanukkah humour; The Latke Song (Mrs. Maccabeus) and Is it Hanukah or Chanukah?
