Welcome to Jigiri Music

There is a particular kind of song that does not survive being written down. You learn it because somebody sang it near you often enough that it stuck. A grandmother at a grinding stone, a group of men walking back from a field, a row of women at a wedding who all seem to know the same third verse.

Jigiri Music started because those songs are getting harder to hear.

What this channel is for

We are recording three kinds of music, and we are not going to pretend they are the same thing:

• Folk songs — the ones that came to us by ear, sung as close to the way we first heard them as we can manage.
• Album songs — new writing, arranged properly, for people who want something to put on in the evening.
• Devotional songs — the invocations and bhajans that belong to particular days of the year.

Why the lyrics matter

A folk song carries its meaning in its words, and a listener who cannot follow the words is only getting half of it. So every song we publish here will have its lyrics on this site — in the original, in transliteration for people who speak the language but do not read the script, and in English translation for everybody else.

That is the part of this project we care most about getting right.

What happens next

Two new videos a month, published to the channel and mirrored here with lyrics on the same day. If a song moves you, the most useful thing you can do is send it to one other person.