Ethel Raim is a singer and public folklorist from New York City who has documented ethnic music statewide. During the 1960s folk revival, Ethel sang in a number of Yiddish and Eastern European groups including the Pennywhistlers. In 1968 she co-founded the Center for Traditional Music and Dance to preserve and present the cultures of immigrant communities. Ethel’s love of music began at home in the Bronx.
Ethel Raim: I can’t remember a time that I didn’t have a connection to traditional music. I grew up in a very heavily dominant Jewish culture. My parents were Yiddish speakers, and they spoke to each other in Yiddish. I went to folk shul, I heard Yiddish songs from a very tender age. My parents would entertain themselves and their friends in people’s homes and people would sing, and so at that age I was put up on a table and I would sing. It was like breathing.
ER: I started work for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It was an incredible experience for me because Doc Watson was there, Mississippi John Hurt, Almeda Riddle, these wonderful traditional artists that I had only heard on record. And I sat very quietly listening and I sat very quietly listening and everyone said, “What a wonderful festival,” and then Ralph Rinzler, who started that festival and who is a legendary figure in folk music, turned to me and said, “What do you think, Ethel?” And I said, “I thought it was an incredible festival, I just missed the accents that I grew up with. They weren’t represented here.” I got $3000 to go out and fetch them, and that’s how I learned how to do field research and work with community, visit with community, find out who helped the community, celebrate how the community celebrated itself, and what their traditions were all about.
ER: My big dream in terms of the work was to be able to let people know about the beauty of this strata of culture that very few people know about. It was to be able to say these cultural forms are on par with these high arts, and it’s really a question of familiarizing and understanding and appreciating with respect and tremendous admiration.
ER: The work of the center really is as a catalyst, as well as helping communities to sustain tradition, and it’s almost more important than ever because of the numbers of immigrants and refugees that are coming to this country. And the kind of plurality of this is wonderful. It is vibrant, it is so alive, and that’s what the work is about.
To hear the full program, tune in Saturdays at 7 and Sundays at 6 on WWNO, or listen at americanroutes.org.