8 Nights of Joy

Album: Home Sweet Home (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • Katherine Jenkins wrote this Hanukkah song with her husband, American artist and film actor-director Andrew Levitas, after the Welsh songstress discovered there aren't many tunes celebrating the Jewish holiday. "My husband and I chose to write a song to celebrate our first Hanukkah together as a married couple," Jenkins told Billboard magazine. "We wanted to write something… that celebrates the season but also explains the main messages of the festival of light in a way for everyone to understand."
  • We're not sure how familiar Katherine Jenkins is with the oeuvre of Woody Guthrie, but the American folk singer did write a number of songs about Hanukkah. His granddaughter Anna Canoni told us. "As a songwriter he would study ideas and write what they call a song cycle about one particular topic. He would jump into this pool of Judaism, for example, and swim all around in it, get his fingertips to his toes soaked in the education of it. And then he would come out and write a song series on this idea. So he wrote tons of songs about Hanukkah, but he wasn't technically Jewish, and when we put out an album called Happy Joyous Hanukkah, everyone said, 'I didn't know Woody was Jewish.'"

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