You can see Lily Henley perform tonight at 7 p.m. at the Bobby Hackett Theater at the CCRI Warwick Campus. Click here for tickets and more information. You can find her music at LilyHenley.com.
Transcript:
Lily Henley was five or six years old when she first heard the fiddle – and she immediately became obsessed with it.
“Always I was asking for a violin all during my early childhood,” she said. “And when I finally got one, I knew that I wanted to play fiddle.”
She got her fiddle at age 11 and soon joined a band.
“They were adults that were, you know, playing local gigs around town,” she said. “And I was like, kind of a precocious 11-12 year old that, I was probably like, very cute. But I was really serious. I was like a real, real nerd.”
Within a couple of years, she was going to a music camp led by the famous fiddle player Mark O’Connor. While she was there, she learned to play in many different styles – old-time, Irish fiddle, Cape Breton, bluegrass and others. Her music today combines those fiddle styles with old Ladino songs that she’s set to new melodies.
“I’m Sephardic. Half my family is Sephardic and … so I grew up with a lot of that music at home. I grew up singing some songs in Ladino as a kid, it was just sort of that part of my identity. It was just kind of an accepted kind of thing,” Henley said. “I guess when I finally came to singing the songs myself, and delving deeper, and like finding new songs, I allowed all of the music influences that came from other styles to affect how I approached my interpretation – just because that is the tradition. The tradition is that the way Sephardic people have always sung in Ladino has been affected by whatever the instrumental tradition and melodic traditions around them have been. And for me, as an American Sephardic artist, a lot of American and other styles of music were influencing me.”
Last year, she performed in Boston for the Christmas Celtic Sojourn concert series.
“There was a moment in the concert every night where I explained what the Ladino language is, and also who we are as Sephardic people. So a lot of people say Spanish Jews, when they’re referring to Sephardic Jews and who we really are, are the descendants of Jews that were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition, which was a long time ago,” Henley said. “So the culture itself actually developed in mostly in the Ottoman Empire, but basically, across North Africa, parts of the Middle East, the southern Mediterranean, there were parts of Western Europe that had Sephardic populations and the whole culture and the language really are a post-expulsion development, which is something that people don’t know a lot about. And the fact that what really makes the language separate from Spanish, is that it has all these influences from Turkish and Arabic and Hebrew … it’s a mishmash language.”
Henley’s latest album is called “Oras Dezauradas,” which means “time out of time.”
[music: Oras Dezauradas]
“In Ladino, ‘Oras Dezauradas’ is almost an idiomatic phrase, like it kind of refers to the way that time feels when you’re just in so much longing and so desperate for something that time just goes on and on forever. Because you’re just, you know, every moment without this person that you love is like a million 1000 years,” she said.
Another song on the album is called “Avre Tu Puerta Serada” which means “open your closed door.”
[music: Avre Tu Puerta Serada]
“There’s this fiddle, this strong fiddle energy, there’s two fiddle tunes on it that I wrote myself that kind of bring in several fiddle styles that have really inspired me over the years,” she said. “It’s almost a cyclical experience of like growing up with all these different musics. And never, I mean, as a kid, I never could have imagined how they would come together in a way that felt authentic to me.”
For The Public’s Radio, I’m James Baumgartner.
