Kum Bachuratzel: A Song History
"Kum Bachur Atzel," given in English as "Get up, you lazy boy," is a Hebrew song from Israel.[1] Zemereshet, an archive devoted to early Hebrew song, lists both its words and its music as being by unknown authors, and it says the Hebrew text was fitted to the melody of a foreign song and sung as a canon.[2] Among the archive's sources is a private song notebook that Mendel Mentzer began keeping in 1935; one man it interviewed, who learned the song in the Hano'ar Ha'oved youth movement around 1943, believed it to be Russian, but the archive does not identify the borrowed tune.[2]
Kamisaka Sekka, Rooster, from Flowers of a Hundred Worlds, color woodcut, 1909–10. A rooster, shown for the round's call to get up; it has no connection to the song.
Another of Zemereshet's informants recalled that his Hano'ar Ha'oved group in Kiryat Haim sang it as a canon in the early 1950s, with the next group of singers coming in after every two lines.[2] The archive lists a 1941 choral recording conducted by Max Goberman in an arrangement by Hanns Eisler, and a 1965 recording by the choir of the Harei Efraim educational institution under Yaakov Sagi, made first for Israel Radio; it also lists the song on the Weavers' 1959 album The Weavers at Home, noting that the track may have been recorded earlier.[2] In the United States it was printed in the United Synagogue songbook Ulshonenu Rina: The Songs We Sing (New York, 1950), and it is the first track on Gladys Gewirtz Sings Hebrew Playsongs, a Menorah Records album prepared for the American Jewish child.[2][3]
For dulcimer players it appears in Mark Gilston's Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers, a 43-page set of rounds, canons and circular songs, offered with each of its 28 pieces also as a separate file, in which several players perform the identical part from staggered starting points to create harmonies and rhythmic contrasts.[4]
Sources
- Musica International: "Kum Bachur Atzel / Get Up You Lazy Boy".
- Zemereshet: "Kum Bachur Atzel (קום בחור עצל)".
- Penn Libraries, Freedman Jewish Sound Archive: "Gladys Gewirtz Sings Hebrew Playsongs".
- Mark Gilston: "Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers".
- Image: Kamisaka Sekka, Rooster, from Flowers of a Hundred Worlds, color woodcut, 1909–10. The Cleveland Museum of Art.