CHUBBY CHECKER - HAVA NAGILA

HAVA NAGILA

CHUBBY CHECKER

Songwriter: Brave Combo

Country: u.k.

Observation: Israeli folk song

Album: twistin’round the world

Label: pye golden guinea records

Genre: twist

Year: 1963

"Hava Nagila" (Hebrew: הבה נגילה, Havah Nagilah, "Let us rejoice") is an Israeli folk song traditionally sung at Jewish celebrations. It is perhaps the first modern Israeli folk song in the Hebrew language that has become a staple of band performers at Jewish weddings and bar/bat mitzvah celebrations. It was composed in the 1920s in the British Mandate of Palestine, when Hebrew was being revived for the first time as a spoken language in almost 2,000 years (since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD). For the first time, Jews were being encouraged to speak Hebrew as a common language, instead of Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino, or other regional Jewish languages.

Abraham Zevi Idelsohn (1882–1938), a professor at Hebrew University, began cataloging all known Jewish music and teaching classes in musical composition; one of his students was a promising cantorial student, Moshe Nathanson, who (with the rest of his class) was presented by the professor with a 19th-century, slow, melodious, chant (niggun or nigun) and assigned to add rhythm and words to fashion a modern Hebrew song. There are competing claims regarding Hava Nagila's composer, with both Idelsohn and Nathanson being suggested.

Hava nagila, hava nagila,

Hava nagila, venishmecha

Hava nagila, hava nagila,

Hava nagila, venishmecha...

Hava naranena, hava naranena,

Hava naranena, venishmecha

Hava naranena, hava naranena,

Hava naranena, venishmecha...

Uru, uru achim,

Uru achim, belev sameach

Uru achim belev sameach,

Uru achim, belev sameach

Uru achim !

Uru achiiiiiim

Belev sameeeeaaaaach...