The Sephardic Brother: Tell us a little about yourself? Where did you grow up and what’s your Sephardic background?
Lily Henley: Before I was 11, I grew up all over the southwest and east coast, since my father was a commissioned Admiral in the US Public Health Service, one of the eight uniformed services in the US Government. We eventually settled in Illinois and I spent most of my pre-teen and teenage years there.
When it comes to my Sephardic background, my paternal grandmother is the one who instilled me with a strong Sephardic identity. When I was a kid, I didn’t really have a connection with Sephardic Judaism, since we didn’t live in a Sephardic community or near a Sephardic synagogue. I knew we had Sephardic heritage and I would listen to Ladino music from singers like Flory Jagoda. What’s more, the area where we lived in Illinois had a particularly acute anti-semitism problem, and it often felt really hard being Jewish among a very non-Jewish community. We basically became more connected to our Judaism as a defense mechanism in response to the discrimination we would face. We lived in a very white, Christian community in suburban Illinois. When we would meet new people, the first two questions would always be “What’s your name and what Church would you go to?” And when I would say I am Jewish they would either try to convert me, say I was going to Hell, or simply shun us. I would also hear some of the classic anti-semtitic tropes in school from kids asking if I had horns or if Jews ran the world.
Because of this, I bonded a lot with the local Hispanic community in my area, which was dominantly Catholic, but was much more welcoming and respectful to our family. The exposed me to modern Spanish and its culture, and that sort of started me on this exploration of my Sephardic heritage.
The Sephardic Brother: When did you get specifically more interested in learning Ladino and producing Sephardic music?
Lily Henley: I do remember learning some Ladino songs and Sephardic melodies when i was a kid. Some of them were pretty popular in the wider Jewish world at the time like Ocho Kandelikas and others were some cute songs for Shabbat. When I went off to the New England Conservatory in Boston to begin my musical training, I met a gentleman there who was one of the foremost Klezmer music revivalists in the US. At first he didn’t know I was Jewish, but when he found out, he was super excited to get me to learn Klezmer. I certainly appreciated this Ashkenazi genre, but it felt like I was learning someone else’s music; another community, another identity. It felt foreign to me and I convinced him to start letting me perform some Ladino music as a part of the ensemble. After that, I went to Tel Aviv for a little while, and that’s where I started an incredible number of passionate Sephardic people, more than I ever had before. My partner at the time was from Israel and the family was 10th generation Jerusalem Sephardic and the family still spoke Ladino. He was also in a musical group that performed a lot of Ladino songs and I was just mesmerized. What’s more, at almost every Ladino performance of his, the entire audience would just sing along with the band. It was amazing! There it really it me; I am not the only person with this love of Sephardic identity and culture. There are other Sepharadim like me!
I grew up with nearly no Jewish community around me, let alone Sepharadim, so to really experience this for the first time was just very powerful. Sephardic culture was like “my thing,” and I was able to discover others who cared about it too.
I ended up learning a lot of new music while in Israel, and had the luck to meet an academic named Susana Weisch-Schahak, who is one of the preeminent ethnomusicologists that collects Ladino and Sephardic music in Israel. These were some random folks songs about love, society, political challenges, music that you probably have never even heard of, and that was very exciting. I just immersed myself in that richness.
The Sephardic Brother: Tell us a little bit about your professional musical background
I grew up learning and performing what’s called American and Celtic fiddle music. I played violin in this very vibrant and fascinating folk musical tradition. These are specific folk traditions that have either had robust revivals or never died out. They’re not endangered and are quite popular. Because of this, I didn’t study classical music until Conservatory, and am a real product of the musical folk process; I was used to taking song into my ear and just doing it, a classic folk music way. I also knew a lot of different ballads that come from the “Child Ballads,” songs where the words are passed down over centuries but the melodies go through dozens of changes every generation. What interested me is that there are a lot of parallels between these Child Ballads and Ladino music. Sephardic music in general was heavily influenced by the regions and cultures our communities sprouted up in. You can hear fusions from local Balkan and Ottoman traditions, hispanic music, flamenco, Greek Rebetico, and others in all our famous songs.
I have always been writing songs in English with new tunes and infusions from different cultural traditions. And it dawned on me that a musical tradition cannot survive without innovation; Flory Jagoda z”L taught me that. When she was writing, her new Ladino songs were in the musical tradition of the local Bosnian culture that she heard growing up in Sarajevo. So when I began to create a new album, I knew some people may not like it because it’s innovative; it’s rooted in classic Ladino music style but it’s also different from my own musical interests and influences. It would be very inauthentic of me to make it either as if I was from the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago or frankly, to do some of the same old stuff. We need new music, and there isn't really a melodic tradition solely unique to our Sephardic world. It really derived from the places where our communities were, like Istanbul, Salonika, or Sarajevo.
What I also discovered is that even if some of the language may sound arcane in historic Sephardic songs, the characters and the story are very personal and modern! There are strong female characters, family struggles, love and folk engagement, these ideas are very relevant to the challenges we face today in daily life.
The Sephardic Brother: Can you give us some insights into your newly published Ladino album: Oras Dezaoradas
Lily Henley: About 5 years ago, I was messing around with a fiddle tune, and this one random Ladino lyric just kind of fit with the tune. So I played around with it and tried performing it, and I was very worried about the reception because it was so different. I didn’t know how other Sepharadim would feel about it. But I made a video, and started posting new content on social media, and I was getting really positive feedback from people in the folks music community. Then all of a sudden, Professor Francois Azar emailed me out of the blue, who is the Vice President of Aki Estamos, a Sephardic organization based in Paris that does a lot of amazing Ladino language publication and educational initiatives. He said he heard my music and wants me to come to Paris to perform, and also wanted to help publish an album! It was wild. He loved my unique, new style of folk music infused with Ladino and that made me feel validated in what I was doing. It confirmed that people thought it was ok that I was writing new Ladino songs in new ways.
And it was so special to have a native Ladino speaker in the sound booth as we were running through Ladino songs. He was able to not only come with a producer’s perspective, but his knowledge of Ladino helped me influence the passion and tune at different points in the language. He would often say, “That was a great take but I don’t think you really held the emotion in your voice during this specific line of Ladino” etc. Wow - finally I was combining my passions together. It combined my own folk music background with Ladino music.
So my new album is a little imaginative; it’s off the beat and path, but it allowed me to learn more Ladino and stay in my musical tradition. I’ve been finishing up my Fulbright Scholarship in Paris and I have finally been able to hone my Ladino into pretty solid fluency, putting me in a really good position to write my own Ladino music going forward without having to rely heavily on support from others for the language challenges I may face. I made this album, “Oras Dezaoradas” - Hours without Hours,” as my first full Ladino album (and full length album), but it certainly won’t be the last.
The Sephardic Brother: So tell us what’s next for you now that you're coming back to the States?
Lily Henley: I’m doing a Jewish Cultural Festival performance in Paris before I come back, then I’ll be going to Wesleyan University for a Master’s Degree in ethnomusicology with plans to get a PhD, while hopefully touring the Ladino album and attending some global Sephardic conferences. My goal is to bring this both to Jews and non-Jews alike. Our music doesn’t need to be limited to our community. The wider folk music world can learn so much from our beautiful Sephardic culture. It’s a bit of a personal goal that people see the wider Jewish narrative, that we’re not relegated to just mainstream, Ashkenomrative culture as default Judaism. Even Ashkenazim don’t even really know who we are, both from ignorance and historic discrminaiton.
I’ll also be playing a really cool Celtic Festival in Boston for example, and they’re excited to have a folk Sephardic Jewish musical act! I will be on my own Sepharidc music journey that will take me in any number of directions; the potential is very exciting.
The Sephardic Brother: How did you find out about the Sephardic Brotherhood?
Lily Henley: I was literally googling Sephardic culture in NYC, and the Brotherhood just popped up and I was shocked! I couldn’t believe that my father grew up in the Forest Hills neighborhood where the Sephardic Brotherhood office is based, but I never knew anything about this organization. But my grandparents wanted nothing to do with their Judaism; they wanted to simply assimilate into American society. They lived in the era of old anti-semitism, quotas in University and discrimination in getting a job if you were Jewish.
So I found out about the Brotherhood online, and for awhile I just signed up for the digital newsletter and attended the NY Ladino Day. Then I said, wait a minute, I can be a member and join the community! There was also a funny moment with Ian Pomerantz, another performer and Brotherhood member, randomly messaged me saying he was Sephardic and would love to connect. And we just hit it off. It’s been wonderful to connect with the Sephardic Digital Academy and learn from other Brotherhood members who care about Sepharidc music like Sarah Aroeste. Just to have others with so much pride in their identity and culture makes me excited to be a member of the Brotherhood and be a part of the good work it's doing.
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