As a genre, folk songs usually cannot be traced back to a single artist, although literary songs were sometimes adopted as popular songs. They were constantly shaped and altered by the people who sang them before literacy reached a significant percentage in the population. Although secular music was banned in Judaism for centuries, songs played an important role in services and prayer (cf. Rubin 5-8). During the middle ages, the creation of “semi-sacred songs” in Yiddish (8) led to the development of a Yiddish tradition of shpilmener, similar to bards, minstrels or other entertainers all over Europe, and eventually made way for a broader Yiddish musical tradition. Mlotek explains how [t]he Yiddish folk song was sung and disseminated by Jews primarily of Eastern Europe. It constitutes a lyrical reflection of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the Jewish people in Yiddish. The songs shed light on religious and secular practices and customs,
The YIVO and a couple of universities supported the endeavors of scholars and laymen to collect folk songs, and the trend of publishing them lasted until after the Second World War.
One collection was compiled by Ruth Rubin by interviewing 61 Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the United States and Canada, for whom folk songs represented a part of their old home in Europe. The song Ver Es Hot in Blat Gelezen (Those Who Read the Newspapers) was recorded in Montreal in 1955 from a Mr. Persky and classified as a topical song, which “[reflects] a variety of attitudes towards specific social phenomena and events” (227). It deals with a pogrom which happened in Odessa, specifically the one in 1871. Furthermore, the annotations reveal that the song was “folklorized from a poem by Abraham Goldfaden”