Donna Donna

A Yiddish theatre song from the 1940s, written by Sholom Secunda and Aaron Zeitlin for a Broadway production, about a calf being carted to market while a swallow flies overhead.

Joan Baez's 1960 recording is the one that made it a standard in English, and its adoption by the American folk revival gave a song written in one language of exile a second life as a general protest against resignation.