Rebbe Elimelekh

Yiddish text

Moshe Nadir · 1927

English words

Walter J. Kin

Performance

Riglis Band

Rebbe Elimelekh is a Yiddish comic song with an identifiable literary author. The Naxos song booklet credits Moshe Nadir for its Yiddish text. Research held in the UCL repository dates the song to 1927 and relates it to the English nursery rhyme Old King Cole.

Its familiar folk-repertoire status should therefore not erase Nadir’s name or make the text anonymous.

The recording here has English words, arrangement and production by Walter J. Kin and is performed by Riglis Band. Its credits describe the melody as traditional. These roles belong to different stages: Nadir’s Yiddish literary song, the melody carried in performance, and Kin’s English retelling.

The comic rebbe is a character; the scenes are not documentary evidence about a historical religious leader.

Kin opens with Elimelekh calling musicians into his house. Fiddlers begin, cymbals join and drums add enough noise to threaten the furniture. Each new group makes the earlier invitation harder to control. The repeated instrumental verbs let the language imitate playing, so the humor is partly in the sound of the words themselves.

The Yiddish text printed by Naxos names fiddlers, drummers and tsimblers, rendered there as cymbalon players. Kin’s English lyrics instead describe cymbals clashing. This is a concrete difference between the versions, not a reason to silently alter the published English words.

A listener comparing them can hear how a musical joke changes with its language and imagined ensemble.

The English story ends with Elimelekh sending the noisy players away, only for their music to continue outside until morning. The pleasure has escaped the person who commissioned it. Listen for the growing ensemble and the change from delighted host to exhausted neighbor.

The selected recording is English; this article explains that version, while Russian and Yiddish performances remain separate listening examples to verify.

Credits & rights

Performer Riglis Band

Music Traditional melody; arrangement and production by Walter J. Kin

Lyrics English adaptation by Walter J. Kin; earlier Yiddish text by Moshe Nadir

Language English

Publisher Rigli Publishing (Walter J. Kin)

Rights owner Rigli Publishing

Licensing Rigli Publishing

Copyright In album collective work (verify deposit)

ISRC CBEYJ2570444

Free to sing, free to teach

These songs are free for synagogues, JCCs, museums, schools, yeshivas and families. For everyone else, free to start, and a modest fee later, so the songs travel and take root.

Questions, or a use we have not thought of? Write to doublesign28@gmail.com.

More about the wider Jewish Songs. For All project at havanagila.org.

Naxos · A Yiddish Winterreise · track17

UCL · Research on Yiddish song in metal repertoires

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