Martha Schlamme was best-known for her interpretations of Jewish folk songs, although her repertory was far wider than that, and embraced music in a dozen languages. For this, her second LP, she returned to a difficult corner of her own past. As a Jewish refugee from Austria, she had avoided much to do with German culture since 1938, but by the early ’50s she’d begun a furtive reassessment of the music, which culminated in this album, recorded in collaboration with Pete Seeger. The results are startling, owing to Schlamme’s ability and the unique circumstances of the recording. As repertory that she obviously hadn’t embraced in many years, she approaches it with a freshness that is spellbinding; at the same time, Seeger’s spirited accompaniment on banjo (and recorder) gives this record a unique rhythmic vitality that one didn’t necessarily find in scholarly folk song collections of the period — at times, one just wants to whoop and holler in response to Seeger’s accompaniment, and that’s never bad in any collection of folk music worthy of the name. And the sound is also surprisingly good, even on the original vinyl copies. – Bruce Eder
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