The Yemenite Women's Songs

A vast oral repertoire sung by Jewish women in Yemen — in ARABIC, their spoken language, and largely by women for women, in parallel to the men's Hebrew and Aramaic diwan.

⭐⭐⭐ THE BEST FIND IN THIS WING, AND IT IS ONE SENTENCE: THE MEN SANG IN HEBREW AND THE WOMEN SANG IN ARABIC. The men's diwan is a written, sacred, transmitted, studied literature. The women's songs are in the vernacular, unwritten, tied to birth, marriage, grinding, mourning — and consequently absent from every account built out of manuscripts. ⭐ Two consequences worth sitting with. First, the women's repertoire is often the older-sounding one, precisely because nothing standardised it. Second, when Yemenite music became a foundation of modern Israeli popular song, what got amplified was mostly the men's side. The recordings below are the correction, made by researchers who went and asked.