One of our great passions is working and researching about oral tradition. All the cultures of the earth treasure oral tradition. The children’s stories, proverbs and songs, that are passed from mouth to ear and that have no known author, are part of this artistic treasure.

The Oral Tradition is not blocked up by the physical, political, religious or ideological borders that the human being constructs. The songs fly through the air and nothing stops them or labels them. These songs are like seeds. Seeds, like songs, have the ability to fly,  the can take root or not and they can mix up with others.

The fact is that the Sephardic Oral Tradition is very rich. The number of songs that this repertoire contains is incredible.

We cannot understand Sephardic culture without taking into account three fundamental aspects: the first is its Hispanic roots; The second is the mix with the different cultures with which it has lived in its exile; and the third and very important one lies in the fact of being a Jewish culture. If we add the gender distinction to these three aspects and focus on the role of women, we add other characteristics of the female figure within this community.

Women: they continue singing despite the impediments. And not only are the songs remembered but they are a hallmark of many peoples. Women whose lives are limited, controlled and regulated by “religious authorities.”

In the diversity of cultures that exist in the world and in very different latitudes, there are women who sing, dance and also play musical instruments. In a time as extensive as the Middle Ages in Spain, the role of women in society was strongly conditioned by what the ecclesiastical authorities ruled – whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim.

The Sephardic Oral tradition collects the songs that represent the Sephardic lyric and that are performed on many different occasions.
The traditional Oral tradition is made up of what in the East were known as songs whose most frequent theme is love. As for the theme, it is very varied, they talk about love and heartbreak, humor, describe situations or places, etc.

There are many songs that talk about beautiful women, those that describe conversations between mothers advising their daughters, those about fidelity or infidelity, and laments of love or desire. In any case, the female figure is the protagonist in practically one hundred percent of all the stories.

Although not as numerous, there are also songs that refer to the soldier who goes to war or those that accompany moments in the cycle of life or religious ceremonies.

The structure and form of the songs is conducive to being performed in a group. It was common to hear them at weddings since the songs contain a chorus (favors group interpretation). A frequent resource in songs is parallelism, which consists of repeating similar structures in different verses or statements.53

In the Songs, unlike romances or “coplas”, the lyrics do not have a continuous plot thread nor a fixed logical order. For this reason, it is very common for there to be songs that borrow verses from others. Its most common structure is the quatrain (four verses of minor art) with rhyme in the even verses. The music of the cantigas is very varied and very sensitive to the musical influences of the environment and the time.

One of the best-known songs among the Sephardim of the East is that of “la morena” (Brown skin girl). Song whose theme offers numerous similarities with medieval Hispanic poetry. Although there are no known medieval melodies corresponding to this song, this is a clear example of the great diffusion of the letter not only in the Jewish world.

Just like in the rest of the songs, the verses do not have a continuous sequence and, in more than one version, verses from different songs are mixed.

There are several versions with different titles. Next, we show one of the lyrics that the different Sephardic versions have the most in common.