When singer, fiddler and songwriter Lily Henley set out to make an album of Sephardic Jewish ballads set to new melodies, she was looking for her own way to interpret a critically endangered tradition. On Oras Dezaoradas (out on Lior Éditions Records), Henley highlights the Ladino language, a threatened tongue that fuses old Spanish with Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian elements, spoken by less than 100,000 people in the world today. What she didn’t expect was to find herself directly connected to centuries of women spread across a forced global diaspora. The album is not a reinterpretation project— Henley’s newly-penned songs are a reclamation and contribution, a living line between her roots in American and Celtic music traditions and the rich history and culture of her Sephardi ancestors.

These old ballads carry the hopes and dreams, daily worries, and existential thoughts of the Sephardi people. They tell stories of everyday life, loss, exile, lovers quarrels and advice-seeking daughters. Known for her expressive songwriting, gifted fiddling, and bell-like vocals, Henley brings new life to these songs and the independent female characters in them—drawing from a well so deep that disparate listeners all feel a connection to their own heritage. With a repertoire encompassing both her Sephardi musical lineage and a broad expanse of influences from across the folk world, in concert Henley weaves ancient and modern languages, cultures and styles to reveal their interconnectedness, and ours.

Henley is a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright award and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Caramoor American Roots Festival, the Denver Botanical Gardens Summer Series, and the New York Sephardic Music Festival. For the past year she has toured as a front-woman with mystic-folk band Rising Appalachia and has collaborated with John Doyle, Brittany Haas, David Krakauer, Rushad Eggleston, The Duhks, and many more.