Martin C. Winer

I attended the 3rd lecture on the Jewish Roots of Tin Pan Alley by Jordan Klapman. My notes on the previous lecture can be found here : http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/jewish-contributions-to-tin-pan-alley

The lecture series will continue with another 3 lectures in December of ’08.

This lecture centered around the success of “Bei Mir Bist Du Shein” (To Me You’re Beautiful) written by Jacob Jacobs (lyricist) and Shalom Secunda (composer). This overtly Jewish (Klezmer) tune was made famous by the Greek (Lutheran) Andrews Sisters. The number was brought to the Andrews Sisters by Sammy Cahn after he heard a performance of it at the Apollo Theater in Harlem sung in the original Yiddish by African American performers Johnnie and George.

The song brought the Andrews Sisters instant stardom with this, their first record. The song was recorded by many other notable artists of the day including Acker Bilk, The Barry Sisters, Buddy Clark, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland (who received coaching in cantorial style from none other than Sam Goldwyn of movie fame), Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Glenn Miller (who had previously passed on the tune), and Teddy Wilson.

There were many other attempts to bring overtly Jewish music into mainstream America. Klapman’s lecture featured many audio examples of such attempts. Regrettably, none of them met with the fame of Bei Mir Bist Du Shein. However, many spin offs of the success of Bei Mir Bist Du Shein resulted.

Within weeks of the meteoric success of Bei Mir Bist Du Shein, radio executives at WHN in New York created a radio review of this new Jewish-Swing fusion called “Yiddish Melodies in Swing”. The show featured the vocals of the Barry Sisters, the “Swingtet” led by Pianist/Composer Sam Medoff, and the clarinet of Dave Tarras. The show had and extended run broadcasting every Sunday for two decades outliving the Golden Age of radio and most of its original audience.

The mainstream born Jewish: Throughout the course of Klapman’s lecture there was a pervasive pattern of mentioning a performers name followed by the Jewish name they were born with. “The Barry Sisters, born Bagelman”, “Sammy Cahn born Samuel Cohen” and on it went throughout the night. It was as if the seeds born of European pedigree needed to shed the husks of their origins before they could sow roots in Western soil. As it was with the performers names’ of the day, so too it was with the music. While Bei Mir Bist Du Shein was a single exemplar of the success of an overtly Jewish tune, allusions to Klezmer in the form of derived motifs and riffs permeated mainstream music coming out of Tin Pan Alley.

In perhaps the finest example of one such fusion taken to the nth degree we have the example of the Wedding Samba recorded by Edmundo Ros selling 3 million copies in 1949. This tune was born of the a earlier English recording of the Wedding Samba in 1940. However, the story continues, this 1940 song was born, in turn, of the Yiddish Theatre song of that same year “Der Nayer Sher” (The New Scissor Dance) composed by Abraham Ellstein.

In a demonstration of the universality of music, Hitler upon hearing the Germanic titled “Bei Mir Bist Du Shein” thought the song was “Wunderbar” until he was told that the song was written by Jews from Brooklyn. This wouldn’t be the first time that Hitlers musical tastes clashed with his politics. He was a tremendous fan of Franz Lehar who had a Jewish wife. He was also a great fan of Emmerich Kálmán of operetta fame who fled the Nazis leaving Europe for America. Music can not only circumvent politics but it can also supersede the original impetus of its composers.

Take for example, “My Little Cousin” recorded by Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee in 1942 which tells the story of boy meets girl. The Yiddish song upon which it was based, “Di Grine Kuzine” (My Green Cousin), tells the story of the culture shock of the new Jewish immigrants to American and ends with “Let this Columbus’s land burn!” As Klapman puts it “recycling is not a modern invention.”

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• The lecture series will continue (tentatively) on December 3, 10, and 17 2008 with details to follow. Jordan Klapman performs with his ensemble at Jazz venues throughout the city including the Free Times Cafe.
• Jordan Klapman’s Klezmer group has a new CD out with details to follow at www.jordanklapman.com
• Jordan Klapman will appear in a free concert:
  Sunday, April 27th 2008
  The Jordan Klapman Trio
  Scarborough Civic Center
  Scarborough, Ontario Canada
  2:00pm – 4:00pm
• Klapman’s website and upcoming events can be found here:
  http://www.jordanklapman.com/
  http://www.jordanklapman.com/gigs/frameset.htm 

I recently attended the second in a series of lectures given by Jordan Klapman on the Jewish contribution to Tin Pan Alley. I regret missing the first in the series and hope to make it for the 3rd. Some notable points from this lecture:

1) It is easy to detect clear Klezmer influences in the music of the period. For example, Klapman played a recording of the Eddie Cantor classic “Lena From Palestina” which has clear origins in the Klezmer standard “Noch a Bisl” (A Little More). Other examples are “And the Angels Sing” recorded by Benny Goodman which owes its origins to “Der Shtiler Bulgar” (A Quiet Bulgar).

2) Prior to 1920 and the advent of records and radio, songs were sold as sheet music. People would purchase the songs and learn to perform them themselves. With the advent of records, sheet music sales declined markedly, and with the advent of radio, even more so.

3) Radio originally refused to pay artists for airing their works. They claimed they were transmitting ‘ether’ (an antiquated term for radio waves). It took ASCAP 7 years of legal proceedings to force radio to pay royalties to ASCAP members. This has strong parallels to file sharing technologies which claim innocence by the defence “we’re transmitting bits.”

4) With the decimation of the sheet music market, music was reduced to a pulp industry. The emphasis was on quantity over quality in the hopes that one song would meet with fame. The advent of radio further exacerbated this problem in that now audiences could tire of music much more rapidly than before. Thus composers were forced to produce more in order to keep themselves in the public eye.