Hi, EBarnacle. I think we had five Arabic songs under consideration for the Rise Again songbook that came out in 2015. I think we got one in, and that one was half in English. The fault is partly mine - I spent hours and hours trying to track down people who could give us licenses for publication, and failed. There was one song I remember where I came across several articles saying how litigious the songwriter was in protecting her rights to her works - but I could never find out how to get past the lawsuits and get legal permission. Our publisher, Hal Leonard, didn't want to deal with litigation. There were lots of songs that Hal Leonard already had permission for, but it was my job to track down rights for the ones not already covered by Hal Leonard. I think Hal Leonard gave us March 30 2015 as the deadline for licenses. Any unlicensed songs were dropped. The book came out about August 15 2015.

We tried to stick with songs that people would be likely to learn, and we didn't come up with any Balkan songs. I'm quite proud of the number of Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, and Italian songs we were able to include - Mudcatter Monique worked with me extensively on our foreign-language songs.

But yeah, I failed on the Balkan and Arabic front. What can I say? No Asian-language songs I can think of. A coupla Russian songs, maybe - but no other Slavic languages.

I did get "Mingulay Boat Song" right. I bought an old copy of a Hugh Roberton songbook, and copied the lyrics from there.

By the way, Mudcat was the primary research tool used on the Rise Again Songbook - and I was the primary researcher.

-Joe-