Broder Singers

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Yiddish popular songs that developed strongly in the second half of the nineteenth century. It clarifies that many of the Yiddish songs were produced by the popular itinerant bards known as Broder singers, who took their name from the city of Brody, a frontier town in nineteenth-century Galicia. It also explains the “Broder singer” as a generic term for performers who provided musical entertainment with short skits and limited use of costumes, make-up, and staging. The chapter describes the nature of the Broder singer's performances. It also recounts how the Broder singers disappeared by the 1930s but left behind a corpus of recordings that has been revived in recent years.