December Musical Gifstravaganza, Day 10 Today we continue the Hanukkah thread...→[More:]with a couple tracks by The Klezmatics from their album Happy Joyous Hanukkkah, a collection of Woody Guthrie's Hanukkah songs. The story of Woody's creative interchange with his mother-in-law, Jewish poet Aliza Greenblatt, is a cool one. I love that Woody, from OK and TX and known for his rootsy folksy Western-influenced music, spent the balance of his life living in Coney Island, reading in comparitive religion, and even gave his son Arlo a hippie Bar Mitzvah. When he was frequently in the hospital at the end of his life, the story goes, he frustrated chaplains and clerks when they asked him to fill out the box for "religion" on the entrance form, and he just wrote "All."

The Many and the Few
Groovy's Freylekhs
Hanukkah's Flame

It's really a great album, a fun blend of American folk & Klezmer/Eastern European music. I recommend it!