Песня «Цэна, Цэна, Цэна»: История и Авторство

Song in Hebrew

"Tzena, Tzena, Tzena" (, "Come Out, Come Out, Come Out"), sometimes "Tzena, Tzena", is a song, written in 1941 in Hebrew. Its music is by Issachar Miron (a. k. a. Stefan Michrovsky), a Polish emigrant in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel), and the lyrics are by יחיאל חגיז.

Miron, born in 1919, left Poland at the age of 19 in the late 1930s, thus avoiding the Holocaust. In 1941, while serving in the Jewish Brigade of the British forces, he composed the melody for lyrics written by Chagiz. The song became popular in the British Mandate of Palestine and was played on the Kol Yisrael radio service. Julius Grossman, who did not know who composed the song, wrote the so called third part of "Tzena" circa November 1946. After hearing Pete Seeger performing Tzena, with The Weavers as backing, Gordon Jenkins made an arrangement of the song for the Weavers with English lyrics. The Jenkins/Weavers version, released by Decca Records under catalog number 27077, was one side of a two sided hit, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard magazine charts in 1950 while the flip side, "Goodnight Irene," reached No. 1. Cromwell Music Inc., a subsidiary of Richmond/TRO, claimed the rights to the song, and had licensed the Decca release. They alleged the music to have been composed by a person named Spencer Ross. In reality this turned out to be a fictitious persona constructed to hide the melody's true authorship. Mills Music, Inc., Miron's publisher, sued Cromwell and won. The presiding judge also dismissed Cromwell's claim that the melody was based on a traditional folk song and was thus in the public domain.