From Oy to Joy
Falch, Niels
DOI:10.33612/diss.125716360
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Falch, N. (2020). From Oy to Joy: Jewish musical style in American popular songs 1892–1945. University of Groningen. https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.125716360
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Jewish Musical Style in American Popular Songs
1892-1945
NUR-code: 664
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Front cover art: A Happy New Year. Hebrew Publishing Co., between 1900 and 1920. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004672480/ (accessed January 13, 2020).
Back cover art: Eugene Ivanov. Jewish Orchestra ID: 334529387. Shutterstock, Inc. Citation for published version (MLA/CMOS):
Falch, Niels. From Oy to Joy: Jewish Musical Style in American Popular Songs, 1892 – 1945. Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2020.
Citation for published version (APA):
Falch, C. N. (2020). From Oy to Joy: Jewish Musical Style in American Popular Songs, 1892 – 1945. Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
First edition, May 2020
All sources of the figures are mentioned in the main body of the text. All figures and tables are for scientific use only. Most sheet music and lyrics published before 1923 are in the U.S. public domain.
© Niels Falch, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any way without prior permission of the author.
Jewish Musical Style in American Popular Songs
1892-1945
PhD thesis
to obtain the degree of PhD at the
University of Groningen
on the authority of the
Rector Magnificus Prof. C. Wijmenga
and in accordance with
the decision by the College of Deans.
This thesis will be defended in public on
Thursday 28 May 2020 at 14.30 hours
By
Casper Niels Falch
born on 21 March 1960
in Bussum
Co-supervisor
Dr. K.A. McGee
Assessment Committee
Prof. P.V. Bohlman
Prof. B.P. van Heusden
Prof. T. Perchard
Dr. B. Titus
Hanny Woudstra (mother)
Fred Falch (father)
Ben Woudstra (uncle)
Abstract ...XI Preface and Acknowledgements...XIII Note on Transliteration...XVII Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Words and Neologisms...XIX Musical Terminology...XXIII Illustrations...XXV
Introduction to the Jewish Musical Style...1
Methodology...11
1. Research Design...11
2. Data Collection...17
3. The Lead Sheet Method...18
4. Periodic Table of Musical Elements...24
“That’s Yiddisha Jazz”: Literature Review...27
1. Analyzing Jewish music...28
2. Jewishness in Popular Music...37
3. Analyzing Popular Music...45
4. Jazz Historiography...49
Part I Oy: “A Brivele fun Russland”
Chapter 1 “Adon Olam”: Sacred Jewish Music...551.1 Synagogue...57
1.2 Cantillation...59
1.3 Hazzanut...68
1.4 Shofar...78
1.5 Home...82
Chapter 2 “Hatikvah”: Secular Jewish Music...89
2.1 Jewish Wedding Music...90
2.2 Yiddish Folk Songs...97
2.3 Hassidic Song of the Soul...104
2.4 Goldfaden’s Yiddish Theater...108
2.5 Jewish Art Music...110
2.6 Zionist Songs...117
Chapter 3 “After the Ball”: American Popular Songscape, 1890...137
Folk Songs, Minstrel Songs, Stephen Foster Songs, Civil War Songs...139,140,141,142 African-American Spirituals, Parlour Songs, Bel Canto Songs...143,145,147 Sousa’s Marches, Ragtime, Tin Pan Alley Songs...148,150,152 Chapter 4 “Eili, Eili”: The Immigrant Song, 1892-1924...157
4.1 Yiddish Theater Songs...160
4.2 Hebe and Oriental Songs...175
4.3 The Golden Age of Cantors...189
4.4 Rags to Riches...196
Chapter 5 “Blue Skies”: The Jazz Age, 1917-1929...205
5.1 The Dawn of Jazz...207
5.2 Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music...210
5.3 Yiddish American Popular Songs...224
5.4 Broadway: The Great White Way...233
5.5 Black, White and Blue...240
5.6 Minor Moods...252
Chapter 6 “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön”: The Swing Era, 1935-1945...259
6.1 The Great Depression...263
6.2 The Dawn of the Swing Era...266
6.3 The Andrews Sisters...271
6.4 Carnegie Hall, January 16, 1938...281
6.5 Hepcats: Cab and Slim & Slam...283
6.6 The Prosody of New York Yiddish...289
Chapter 7 “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”: Neo-Jewish Music, 1935-1945...297
7.1 The Golden Age of Yiddish Film Songs...302
7.2 The Golden Age of Hollywood Film Musicals...312
7.3 The Golden Age of Jewish Radio...317
7.4 The Golden Age of American Radio...321
7.5 Billie Sings the Blues, Jewish Musical Style...327
7.6 Cole Porter’s Jewish Tunes...335
Conclusion: “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” ...343
1. Summary of Findings...344
2. Limitations of Research...349
3. Future Research...351
Bibliography, Discography, Digital Archives and Filmography...357 Bibliography...357 Discography...318 Digital Archives...384 Filmography...290 Abstract in Dutch...393 Short Biography...395
Abstract
In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe and their descendants collectively developed a Jewish musical style that would alter American popular music. Composers such as Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Jerome Kern drew (consciously and subconsciously) upon stereotypical elements from the broad spectrum of Ashkenazic Jewish music. They incorporated features from cantillation, wedding music, and folk songs, first into Yiddish theater songs, and later into Broadway musicals and musical films. During the 1930s, songwriters wrote hit songs reflective of this Jewish musical style including “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,” “Blue Skies,” “Donna Donna,” “I Love You Much Too Much,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” and “Summertime.” However, since then, this style has not been systematically analyzed, nor conceptualized as a historically relevant musical style in relation to other popular music stylistic developments (e.g. the “Latin Tinge”).
Building on theories of Meyer’s definition of a musical style, Lomax’ cantometrics, and Gottlieb’s adaptations, adoptions, and absorptions, this dissertation integrates methods from comparative musicology supplemented with newly adapted and designed approaches and terms such as the lead sheet method and the periodic table of musical elements. In addition, this cross-cultural study also introduces the role of five minor moods, especially the happy minor which is characteristic of the Jewish musical style. Furthermore, this study investigates the relationship of mass media such as the phonograph record, radio, and sound film. Finally, this dissertation argues for the recognizable presence of a cultural and musically rooted Jewish music style concomitant with the development of an American popular music canon in the first half of the twentieth century.
Preface and Acknowledgements
When I was a toddler, my Yiddishe momme (Jewish mother) provided me with love, attention, and music. My early childhood was imbued with music. My mother listened to popular songs on a light grey Philips table radio and played vinyl records on a small plastic black and white turntable during the day. I can still recall the feeling of happiness about these moments with my parents while listening to songs.1
The ones I remember best from my childhood in the early sixties were: “Yes My Darling Daughter” (1962) by Eydie Gormé, “Petite Fleur” (1959) by Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, and “Havah Nagilah” (1959) by Harry Belafonte. The swing rhythm and the extremely high glissando at the end of “Yes My Darling Daughter,” the intimacy of the timbre of the first notes of “Petite Fleur,” and the rousing rhythms of “Havah Nagilah” received my special attention.
Forty years later, I went to search for my Jewish background and identity, attending synagogues, Jewish festivals and parties, and learning about Jewish customs. I soon noticed similarities between Jewish music and certain popular songs. I was convinced; there must undoubtedly be tons of literature about this resemblance. Surprisingly, after extensive exploration on the Internet, I was amazed to discover that there seems to be little research about this topic. Subsequently, I contacted Edwin Seroussi, head of the Jewish Music Research Centre in Jerusalem.2
He directed me to the American composer and musicologist Jack Gottlieb, who had worked as the assistant to the conductor Leonard Bernstein. Gottlieb was just about to publish thirty years of research about Jewish music and American popular songs.
When Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood was released in 2004, I was a bit disappointed, but on the other hand, flattered that so many examples I also discovered myself were mentioned in the book. However, I found gaps in the Gottlieb’s work and decided to continue with my research. Therefore, I went on a musical and academic journey, which had everything to do with my musical background. My early childhood musical experiences and emotions certainly left a blueprint in my brain. The strong emotional tension of my parents hearing and making music in the early sixties determined my emotional reference and expectation with music for the rest of my life. This process must have probably, been the same as during the childhood of Jewish songwriters with an immigrant background in the early twentieth century.3
Fifty years later, I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the many people who made this study possible. First, I would like to express my gratitude to my mother Hanny Woudstra for introducing me to the music of George Gershwin as a child and providing me with songs from singers such as Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong. Naturally, I would like to thank my father Fred Falch, who used to 1 Professor of psychology Isabelle Peretz published about research on music and emotion with children and is the director of the Brams research laboratory (www.brams.org).
2 The Jewish Music Research Centre is part of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. 3 Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, and Al Jolson were all sons of cantors.
play the Andrews Sisters, gypsy music, and tangos on the piano at home. In addition, I would like to thank my uncle Ben Woudstra for pointing out the importance of the singer Al Jolson, and my stepmother Corry Falch-Bot for introducing me to the Great American Songbook.
Freek de Wolff encouraged me to write a doctoral dissertation and connected me to Louis Grijp, who subsequently put me in contact with Walter van der Leur. From the start, these three men believed unconditionally in the topic of my research. I am also grateful to Kees van Hage, who patiently listened to all my twisted ideas and supplied me with sound advice. Wim van der Meer allowed me to become a member of the Music and Culture Analysis (MACA) reading group at the University of Amsterdam. He introduced me to the broad field of cultural musicology.
For several years, I have been honored to have been able to have weekly discussions on my topic, among other things, with Jack Lawrence (“All or Nothing at All”). Jack was one of the last living legends who could tell firsthand about the Tin Pan Alley period and its composers. Another living legend was Irving Fields. During my time in New York, he invited me to the restaurant where he played the piano and surprised me with a song he had specially composed for my birthday. In the same period, Mark Kligman welcomed me to Hebrew Union College, listened to my wild ideas, and provided me with papers.
In addition, I would like to thank Wendy L. Belcher, Judah M. Cohen, Hans Crebas, Lydia Goehr, Tilly de Groot (American Embassy), Jeff Janeczko, Patricia Jarkulisz (“it must schwing!”), Jonathan Karp, Willem Klooster, Peter van Kranenburg (computational musicology), Jeffrey Magee, Anton Molenaar, Bruno Nettl (“I’d be curious about your method”), Velvel Pasternak (“I’m sure it will be most worthwhile”), Alissa Quint, Henry Saposznik, Maxine Schackman, Richard Taruskin (“looking forward to more”), Jeremy Yudkin, and Irene Zwiep (“Are you sure you want to do this?”) for their interest and time discussing my research. Special thanks are due to Phil Bohlman, with whom I discussed my research and my academic future inside of the Snoge, the ancient Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. During my research, Abebooks, Better World Books, the Book Depository, and Amazon provided me with a comprehensive collection of rare books. In addition, The Chicago Manual of Style became a fine companion over the past years. Many thanks to Ron van der Wiel and Janny Bultman for helping me with my first poster presentation, and for keeping my computers up and running. A special thank you goes to Wander Mulder for helping me with Finale notations. My thanks to Brenda Kaldenbach for her thoughtful editing of my manuscript.
The Faculty of Arts and ICOG of the University of Groningen gave me the opportunity to achieve my goals. At the Graduate School for the Humanities, I would like to thank Jan-Wouter Zwart and especially Marijke Wubbolts for her committed support. I am proud of my fellow Ph.D. candidates Rob Ahlers, Andre Arends, and Harm Timmerman for commenting on my drafts. Of course, I should mention Chris Tonelli for constantly emphasizing the importance of arguments. I feel privileged to have worked with two inspiring doctoral advisors. Special thanks for my promotor
Prof. Wout van Bekkum, who regularly asked “Have you already finished?” in the early stage, pointing out the importance of a tight schedule, and who provided me with sound advice and comments. I owe a debt of gratitude to my “daily” supervisor and co-promotor Dr. Kristin McGee, who welcomed me to the University of Groningen, and who guided me gradually along the way of writing this doctoral dissertation. Thank you so much for your patience, guidance, and comments.
During my research and writing process, several people around me passed away: Charles Gobes, Alice van Keulen, Erik Löffler, Louis Grijp, Jack Lawrence, Irving Fields, Aart Geist, Henk van der Neut, Annette Roco, Annemarie van Wolde, Mr. van der Wiel, Mr. and Mrs. Bultman, and my father Fred Falch. May their memory be a blessing.
Finally, I would like to express my indebtedness to Monique, my partner in life, for her love and understanding, for believing in me, and for giving me space to accomplish this dissertation.
Note on Transliteration
The present study follows, in general, the YIVO transliteration of Yiddish words and the Encyclopaedia Judaica of Hebrew words. However, because of the large versatility of transliteration, I have tried to ensure consistency in orthography as much as possible. Consequently, I will write havah nagilah instead of hava nagila, and ahavah rabbah instead of ahava raba. In addition, I prefer to write hazzan and hazzanut instead of other possible spellings. Nevertheless, I will occasionally use a different spelling of song titles according to the original sheet music or the record label. Despite all my good intentions, I take full responsibility for all remaining errors.
Sound Example in Text English Equivalent
Vowels: a hazzan father o yom gold oy oy boy u kippur book Consonants:
g minhag give, good
kh khasene Scottish Loch Ness, as in the German Bach
h hazzan Loch Ness, Bach
h Halakhah hall
sh Shabbat shot, sheet
Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Words and Neologisms
In addition to The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.), I also use the Master Style Sheet and Guidelines (2017) of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.
Adonay Malakh (abbreviated AM). Scale used as prayer mode. Ahavah Rabbah (abbreviated AR). Scale used as prayer mode. aleph-bet. Hebrew alphabet.
Ashkenazim. East-European Jews.
aron kodesh. The cabinet where the Torah scrolls are kept. bar mitzvah. Coming of age ritual for Jewish boys.
badkhn. A traditional jester who performed at weddings and other celebrations. bimah. Podium in front of the synagogue.
brit milah or brith. Circumcision ceremony. davenen. Praying.
di alte heym. The old country, Russia.
di goldene medine. The golden land, America.
Diaspora. The dispersion of Jews beyond the Land of Israel.
doina. A musical style played at weddings in a free meter with ornamentation. earticulate. The ability of hearing thoroughly.
gematria. Jewish numerology. hai. Life. Often spelled as chai. Halakhah. Jewish law.
happy minor. Up-tempo songs in the minor key with a happy-go-lucky /
nothing-to-worry-about character.
hard musical imprints. Awareness of musical elements as the rational side of music. Haskalah. The Jewish Enlightenment.
Hassidic Jews or Hassidim. Hassidism is a branch of Judaism in Eastern Europe
focused on mysticism and spirituality.
hazzan (pl. hazzanim). A cantor who leads the prayer services in the synagogue. hazzanut. The musical repertoire of the hazzan.
heder. A Jewish school for children. heym. Home.
holistic ethnomusicology. The totality of disparate musical manifestations of the
Other.
intrinsic Bulgar rhythm. An underlying Bulgar rhythm, which is not too obvious. Jewish music canon. The whole of Jewish music in a broad sense.
Jewish musical style. A musical style based on quintessential characteristics of the
canon of Jewish music.
Jew notes. Comprising a combination of minor second, augmented second, minor
third, raised fourth, rising minor sixth, and octave intervals.
Kaddish. The mourning ritual prayer for the dead recited in Aramaic and not Hebrew,
kale. Bride.
khasene. Jewish wedding. khasentes. Female cantors. khosen. Bridegroom. khupe. Wedding canopy. kippah. Small skullcap.
klezmer. Jewish wedding music. klezmorim. Musicians.
Kol Nidre. Opening declaration in the synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur. kosher. According to Jewish dietary laws.
krekhts (pl. krekhtsn). Instrumental sob and moan imitations in wedding music. kvetch. To complain.
Landsmanshaft. Society of immigrants from the same town or region.
lead sheet method. Examining the basic musical elements of a song by analyzing the
notated melody, chords, and lyrics, regardless of the arrangement and performance.
leyenen. Reading of the Torah. loshn-koydesh. Holy language.
mammeloshen. Yiddish as the Jewish mother tongue.
Masoretes. Medieval Jewish scribes from the Galilean city Tiberias. mazel tov. Congratulations! Mazel means luck, and tov is good. minhag. Habit or custom.
minor bridge. In a major mode song a minor-key bridge, often in a Jewish musical
style for keeping a nostalgic feeling of the past.
minor moods. Different moods of the minor key such as the sad, melancholy,
oriental, exotic and happy minor.
Mi Sheberakh (abbreviated MS). Scale used as prayer mode.
musical compound. Connecting two or more different musical elements from the
periodic table in a song.
musical formula. Consisting of musical compounds in a song, part of an arrangement
with other elements and instruments.
neo Jewish music. In the 1930s, reflecting a revival of Jewish music from the Old
World often in a new arrangement and performance.
nign or niggun. A wordless devotional tune sung by Hasidim. nusakh. Style of a community.
omed. The table holding the Torah scroll.
oy. An exclamation to express despair, dismay, pain, worry, etc. oy gevalt. An exclamation of shock.
oy vey. An exclamation of dismay.
parallel song industry. Two or more similar song industries at the same time. Purim. Jewish carnival, feast with a non-religious character.
Purimshpil. Purim play. A Jewish folk comedy during Purim. rabbi or rebbe. Teacher of the Torah.
Rosh Hashanah. The Jewish New Year.
schmaltz. Excessive sentimentality, especially in entertainment and the arts. Seder. Traditional meal on the first day of Passover remembering slavery in Egypt. Sabbath or Shabbat. Day of rest, no work, seventh day of the week, and service at
synagogue.
shtayger. The prayer scales. shtetl. Village.
shtiebel. A little house or room. shul. Synagogue.
shund. Literally trash. A form of melodrama for the common people. siddur. Jewish prayer book.
simchas or simches. Joyous occasions, such as parties and celebrations. soft musical imprints. The event as a whole as the emotional side.
songscape. Various popular songs in an area, such as the Lower East Side in
Manhattan.
synagogue. Jewish church, a house of praying and studying.
Talmud. Book with discussions and commentary on Jewish history, law, customs and
culture.
ta ‘am (pl. te ‘amim). Sign above and under the Torah text that indicates the melodic
utterance.
Torah. Pentateuch, first Five Books of the Hebrew Bible.
trope (pl. tropes). Sign above and under the Torah text that indicates the melodic
utterance.
tsedaka. Charity.
Tu b’av. Jewish Valentine’s Day, a day of love.
yamim nora’im. The Days of Awe. The High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur.
Yiddish. Social language of the Ashkenazi Jews with mixed German, Hebrew and
Slavic words. Yiddish literally means Jewish.
Yinglish. Combination language of English and Yiddish. Yom Kippur. Jewish Holy Day, the Day of Atonement.
Musical Terminology
In the musical notation in the text, the scientific pitch notation (SPN), or also called the American Standard Pitch Notation (ASPN), is used. In the scientific pitch notation, C4 is the middle C, and other notes are for instance D4, E4, Ab4, G#4. The note G#4 is a half-step (semitone) higher than G4, and Ab4 is a half-step lower than A4.4
Interval names are: Unison (P1): 0 step
Minor second (m2): 1 half step
Major second (M2): 2 half steps (or a whole step) Minor third (m3): 3 half steps
Major third (M3): 4 half steps Perfect fourth (P4): 5 half steps
Augmented fourth (A4) or diminished fifth (d5): 6 half steps Perfect fifth (P5): 7 half steps
Minor sixth (m6): 8 half steps Major sixth (M6): 9 half steps Minor seventh (m7): 10 half steps Major seventh (M7): 11 half steps
Octave or perfect eighth (P8): 12 half steps
A diatonic scale consists of the white keys on the piano: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C.
A chromatic scale consists of the white keys including the black keys of the piano: C-C#-D-D#-E-F-F#-G-G#-A-A#-B-C.
A pentatonic scale is based on five notes, namely in major: C-D-E-G-A, or the black keys on the piano, and in minor: A-C-D-E-G.
Melodic intervals between two notes can be described by step, skip, and leap. Step is the distance between two successive pitches in a diatonic scale, for example from C to D, and G to A. Skip is the distance between two steps, for example, C to E and G to B. Leap is the distance between two large steps, for example, C to F and C to A. Chords are written in capitals as Am for A minor, E for E major, Bb for B flat, C# for C sharp, and D7 for D seventh. The seven chords in the major scale are described with Roman numeral names:
I (major), ii (minor), iii (minor), IV (major), V (major), vi (minor), vii (diminished). The harmonic minor scale with a raised seventh step with Roman numeral names: i (minor), ii (diminished), III (augmented), iv (minor), V (major), VI (major), vii (diminished).
4 Other ways of notation are the Helmholtz pitch notation (HPN): C, c’, c’’, and ABC notation, a computerized notation.
Chord symbols of the natural minor scale can also be written as: Am: Im, B: II, C: III, Dm: IVm, Em: Vm, F: VI, G: VII.
The tempo of a song will be indicated by BPM (Beats per Minute), where 50 to 85 BPM is a slow tempo, 86 to 110 BPM is a mid-tempo, 111 to 124 is an up-tempo and 125 to 170 BPM is a fast tempo.
A dotted rhythm, or Humpty Dumpty rhythm, consists of an accented dotted eighth note, followed by an unaccented sixteenth note. The Scotch snap, or Lombard rhythm, consists of an accented sixteenth note, followed by an unaccented dotted eighth note.
Picardy third: when a song in a minor mode ends with a major chord.
The relative minor of a major key or relative major of a minor key. Am is the relative minor of C.
Parallel key: the parallel major key of C minor is C major. Scales with the same tonic. Triplets: three notes in the length of two of the same rhythmic value.
Syncopation: when an accent of a note comes on an offbeat, instead of a regular beat.
The Circle of Fifths is a diatonic scale following clockwise a perfect fifth interval, which consists of seven semitones.
In the major mode, clockwise: C-G-D-A-E-B-F#
In the major mode, counter-clockwise a perfect fourth interval: C-F-Bb-Eb-Ab-Db-Gb In the minor mode, clockwise: A-E-B-F#-C#-G3-D#
Illustrations
Figures
0.2.1. Cantometrics modal profile for North America: 374 songs 0.2.2. Lead sheet of “Nature Boy” from the New Real Book vol. 1 0.2.3. “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” from the Real Book vol. 2 0.2.4. “All the Things You Are” lead sheet
1.1. Rosowsky’s Table of the Twenty-Eight Graphemata 1.2. The Trop of the Torah by A.Z. Idelsohn, 1928
1.3. Pentateuch Mode and Accents by A.Z. Idelsohn, 1929 1.4. Ahavah Rabbah scale
1.5. Amida mode
1.6. High Holidays morning prayers 1.7. Kerova mode
1.8. “Ki al Rachmechoh”
1.9. “Kol Nidre” by Aaron Beer, ca.1765 1.10. “Kol Nidre” Eastern Europe tradition
1.11. Schofar-Töne according to Abraham Baer in 1894 1.12. Shofar blasts for Ashkenazim in the Jewish Encyclopedia 1.13. Shofar direction from Salomon Sulzer’s Schir Zion 2.1. Bulgar rhythm
2.2. “Khosen-Kale Mazel Tov” 2.3. “Ojfn Pripetsjik”
2.4. “Joske Fort Awek” 2.5. “Zehn Brider”
2.6. “The Alter Rebbe’s Niggun,” Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi 2.7. Niggun version of “Havah Nagilah”
2.8. “Sha, Shtil” A.Z. Idelsohn 1999 vol. x no. 214
2.9. Cover of “Eine Tanzimprovisation über ein hebraïsches Volkslied” by Achron 2.10. Backside of “Eine Tanzimprovisation über ein hebraïsches Volkslied” 2.11. “Hatikwah” in Hermann Ehrlich’s Noten-Buch, 1906
2.12. “Dort wo die Zeder” from Ehrlich’s Noten-Buch in 1906 2.13. “Die Soche” by Eliakum Zunser in 1887
2.14 Kol Nidre motif 2.15 “Havah Nagilah”motif
3.1. Etude Op. 25 No. 9 in Gb or Butterfly Etude by Frederic Chopin 3.2. The Banjo by Louis M. Gottschalk in 1855
3.3. “Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin in 1899 3.4. “After the Ball” by Charles K. Harris in 1892
4.1. Beilin family registration Ellis Island September 14, 1893 4.2. “Eili, Eili, Lomo Asavtoni”
4.4. “A Brivele der Mame” 1907 4.5. “Chosen Kale Mazal Tov” 1909 4.6. “Das Pintele Yud” 1909
4.7. Stepping stone to the chorus of “Leben Sol Columbus” 1915 4.8. Chorus of “Leben Sol Columbus” 1915
4.9. Sheet music cover of “Sadie Salome Go Home!” 1909 4.10. “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band” 1906 4.11. “At the Yiddisher Ball” and the “Hatikvah” motif, 1912 4.12. “Adoshem Moloch” by Yosef Rosenblatt, 1927
4.13. “Sholom Alechem” 1918
5.1. Cover of The Dearborn Independent, August 6, 1921 5.2. Chorus of “Everybody’s Doin’It” 1911
5.3. Vamp part “till ready” in the song “In Room 202” 1919 5.4. “Hebrew Melody” 1921
5.5. “My Yiddishe Momme” 1925
5.6. “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise” 1928
5.7. “My One and Only” by George and Ira Gershwin, 1927 5.8. “Noyakh’s Teyveh,” by Abraham Goldfaden, 1898 5.9. “S Wonderful” by George Gershwin, 1927
5.10 Jew notes
5.11. Rhapsody in Blue, piano version, 1924 5.12. “Blue Skies,”by Irving Berlin, 1927
6.1. Three-against-four swing rhythm with triplets 6.2. Swing rhythm with triplets like a dotted rhythm 6.3. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” 1932
6.4. “Hatikvah” Hermann Ehrlich ed., 1906
6.5. “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)” chorus, 1932 6.6. “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)” verse, 1932
6.7. “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” and the Battle of Swing! The Evening Star March 1938 6.8. “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” lead sheet, 1937
6.9. “Der Rebbe Elimelech” traditional Yiddish folk song
6.10. Yiddish-English Maintenance and Shift in the USA (1940-1960) 6.11. “So if you didn’t care, so why be mad?” Herman and Herman 1997 6.12. “Look who’s talking!” Herman and Herman 1997
6.13. “He don’t care” Herman and Herman 1997 6.14. “Is here a store” Herman and Herman 1997
7.1. “Zehn Brider” from S. Kisselhof’s Liderzamelbukh, 1924 7.2. “Oy, hert Zich Ayn, Mayne Libe Mentshn” from Ruth Rubin 7.3. “It Takes a Long Pull to Get There” from Porgy and Bess, 1935 7.4. “Hevenu Shalom Alechem” from The Jewish Fake Book, 1997 7.5. “Oi, Mamme, Bin Ich Farliebt” 1941
7.6. “Over the Rainbow” 1939, bridge
7.8. Shevarim, the second blast of the shofar, Idelsohn 1951 7.9. Kol Nidre motif
7.10. “Am Yisroel Chay,” from Idelsohn’s Songs of the Chassidim 7.11. “Dona Dona” by Sholom Secunda. 1940
7.12. “My Funny Valentine” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, 1937 7.13. St. Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach, first part, 1727
7.14. Radio listings for the week, The New York Times, January 16, 1944 7.15. “Yesterdays” Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach, 1933
7.16. “Yesterdays” Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach, 1933 7.17. “Body and Soul” by Johnny Green, 1940
7.18. “Vége a Világnak” original version by Rezsö Seress and Lázló Jávor, 1933 7.19. “Gloomy Sunday” Rezsö Seress and Sam Lewis, 1936
7.20. “Don’t Explain” Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr., 1946 7.21. “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” by Cole Porter, 1938
Tables
0.2.1. Example of the lead sheet method analysis 0.2.2. Periodic Table of Musical Elements
1.1. Characteristics of cantillation 1.2. Characteristics of hazzanut 1.3. Characteristics of the shofar
1.4. Characteristics of songs in the Jewish home 1.5. Overarching characteristics of sacred Jewish music 2.1. Taxonomy of Jewish Music
2.2. Jewish Music Reference Sheet
2.3. Periodic table of Jewish musical elements
3.1. American Popular Songs Approx. 1900 Reference Sheet 4.1. Analysis of “Eili, Eili”
4.2. Analysis of “A Brivele der Mame”
4.3. Analysis of “Palesteena” (or “Lena from Palesteena”) 4.4. Formula of “Palesteena” (or “Lena from Palesteena”) 4.5. Analysis of “Rebecca (Came Back from Mecca)” 4.6. Formula of “Rebecca (Came Back from Mecca)” 4.7. Periodic Table of Cantorial Singing in 20th Century 5.1. Songs in the Old Songs Period
5.2. Characterization of the Keys by Christian Schubart, 1787-9 6.1. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Formula PTJME
6.2. “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” Formula PTJME 6.3. Cab Calloway’s Jewish musical style songs
7.1. “Gloomy Sunday” by Billie Holiday Formula PTJME 7.2. Cole Porter’s Jewish tunes in chronological order
Introduction to the Jewish Musical Style
The Jews have always been a nation of singers, have always found in song an outlet for their agitating griefs, their temptations, their wrath. And now, when that nation has singled out from itself an intellectual class, it not only can but must speak to the world in a musical language of its own.– Leonid Sabaneev, 1924-29, 468
Little attention has been paid to a Jewish musical style in popular music history books, a style that emerged in mainstream American popular songs with the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe in the first decennia of the twentieth century and flourished in the late 1930s. While the many studies that consider Jewish music and Jewish popular culture in the United States have meaningfully treated various facets of this influence, a formal acknowledgment of this Jewish style and its impact upon American popular music is underdeveloped. However, despite this lacuna in academic scholarship, the concept of a Jewish musical style is not new.
In 1924, Russian musicologist, music critic, and composer Leonid Sabaneev (1881-1968) had already written about the Jewish musical style that arose from “The Jewish National School in Music” in Russia, whereby he characterized this style by:
The tropal character of the melody; its organic “homo-phony;” its melodic ornamentation, rich and luxuriantly developed; the recitative, unmeasured character of the distribution of the melodic profile; the complex, passionate, and always dynamic emotion with which these creations are permeated-here you have the general type of the Jewish melos. In the folk-melody, we see the successive stages of the extinction of these age-old features, the penetration of the European “minor” or the Asiatic scale, and the simultaneous measuring of the melody into the clear-art rhythms of the Aryan type.1
According to Sabaneev, this Jewish musical style could develop from the “largest Jewish population and a correspondingly large intelligentsia” in Russia and the “persecution of the Jews in the time of the Tsars,” whereby they retreated into their ethnic communities.2
Following the trend of global musical nationalism at the turn of the nineteenth century, a group of classical Russian Jewish composers such as Joseph Achron, Mikhail Gnessin, Mikhail “Moshe” Milner, and Swiss composer Ernest Bloch started to create Jewish national music by developing a Jewish musical style that consisted of seemingly 1 Leonid Sabaneev and S. W. Pring (translation), “The Jewish National School in Music,” The Musical Quarterly vol. 15, no. 3 (July 1929): 456. Originally written in 1924. http://www.jstor.org/stable/738332 (accessed August 18, 2015).
quintessential and therefor recognizable elements from both a sacred and secular idiom.3 Due to the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918), the Russian Revolution
(1917), and the continuing presence of anti-Semitism, this group of composers fell apart after two decennia, and many of them moved to Palestine or the United States of America. However, the development of a Jewish musical style was not solely restricted to the classical music of the Jewish intelligentsia in Russia and Eastern Europe. At the same time, mainly poor Russian Jews who lived in the Pale of Settlement, also incorporated traits of sacred and secular music in their folk songs and songs from the Yiddish theater.4 Subsequently, they developed a style that coincided with the
Jewish musical style of classical composers. Unfortunately, these Jewish composers and musicians had few opportunities to improve their Jewish musical style because of the political and social turmoil in Russia. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881, Jews were confronted by pogroms in the next decennia, which more or less forced them to leave the country. Consequently, a subsequent Jewish exodus followed and between 1892 and 1924, two million Jews started a new life in America.5 In this new environment, Jewish immigrants brought their musical roots
from the Old World (Russia and Eastern Europe) to the New World (America). One of them was the young Irving Berlin, whose music would become synonymous with American popular songs in the first half of the twentieth century.
The life of Jewish American composer Irving Berlin (1888-1989) ran parallel to the development of American popular music. As the Russian immigrant Israel Beilin, he came to America in 1893, only five years old. Israel had been born to cantor Moses Beilin and his wife Leah as the youngest of eight children.6 In 1907, he
changed his name to Irving Berlin.7 In the early decades of the twentieth century, he
saw the opportunities in the growing entertainment industry. For one hundred and one years, Irving Berlin emerged as one of the creators of the canon of American popular song, contributing such seminal tunes as “White Christmas,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Easter Parade,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Blue Skies,” and “God Bless America.”
The metamorphosis of poor Russian Jewish immigrants, such as Irving Berlin, into successful men and women who made it to the top of the fast-emerging entertainment industry, is remarkable.8 Instead of working long hours in sweatshops in the garment
3 In 1908, these young Jewish composers founded the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music. 4 The Pale of Settlement was a restricted area where Jews were allowed to live and work that ran from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea in Russia.
5 Martin Gilbert, Jewish History Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), 77. The number encompassed immigrants from the official opening in 1892 of Ellis Island as a New York immigrant station to the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted newcomers in America.
6 David Leopold, Irving Berlin’s Show Business (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2005), 10. 7 Ibid, 11.
8 See Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture (London, New York: Verso, 2004); J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America. Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kenneth Aaron Kanter, The Jews on Tin Pan Alley: The Jewish Contribution to American Popular Music, 1830-1940 (New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc, 1982); Bruce Zuckerman, Josh Kun and Lisa Ansell ed., The Song is Not the Same: Jews and American
industry as their parents did, young Jewish immigrants saw opportunities to work as artists, song pluggers, songwriters, or publishers. The list of Jews who built careers as songwriters in the first decades of the entertainment industry is long, including among others Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Rome. Entertainment became their new religion, and subsequently business.9 As Irving Berlin was wont to say: “There’s no business, like show business.”
By selling songs, Jewish American composers found a way to earn a living, and they often transformed old melodies of the synagogue, wedding music, lullabies, and Yiddish folksongs into new songs. In the literature published during the last two decades, there are indications of so-called “Jewish tunes,” “Yiddish melodies,” “Semitic coloring,” “minor-key melodies,” “the twist in the notes,” and “Yinglish songs.” On the other hand, composer and director Leonard Bernstein denied the presence of a Jewish musical style claiming:
At a meeting of the National Jewish Music Council, held in the Jewish Museum on January 12, 1948, Leonard Bernstein discussed “The Problem of Jewish Music.” Comparing the development of modern Palestinian music with the early development of American music, he concluded that Palestine would eventually evolve a musical style expressive of the many cultures represented there. However, Mr. Bernstein expressed his belief that, because of our history, there is no distinctive Jewish musical style, and suggested that any music which the listener or creator considers to be Jewish must be called such.”10
Nevertheless, besides the existence of Jewish musical elements in popular songs, there are anecdotal signs of the existence of a compelling and recognizable Jewish musical style.
In 1999, historian Stephen J. Whitfield wrote about the so-called Jewish tunes by the non-Jewish composer Cole Porter:
One account has him asking George Gershwin for the secret of Broadway success and being advised to “write Jewish,” instructions that Porter interpreted as “write Middle Eastern.” The conversation with Gershwin may be apocryphal. But Rodgers distinctly recalled Porter telling him that Broadway required twentieth-century talent for writing “Jewish tunes,” a claim that Rodgers decoded as the use of strongly chromatic, sensuous “minor-key melodies” that would sound “unmistakably eastern Mediterranean. 11
Popular Music (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2011).
9 Jeffrey Knapp, “Sacred Songs Popular Prices, Secularization in the Jazz Singer” Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008), 313-335. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/529059 (accessed March 21, 2015). Jeffrey Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009).
10 Sholom J. Kahn, “Cultural Activities” The American Jewish Year Book, Vol. 50 (1948-1949 / 5709), 178-201. American Jewish Committee https://www.jstor.org/stable/23603338 (accessed April 30, 2019). 11 Stephen J Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover: University Press of New England,
In addition, Whitfield mentioned how lyricist Hammerstein asked Jewish composer Jerome Kern which music he would write for a musical about the Italian explorer Marco Polo:
When Hammerstein was working with Jerome Kern on adapting Donn Byrne’s biography of Marco Polo, the lyricist inquired: “Here is a story laid in China about an Italian and told by an Irishman. What kind of music are you going to write?” Kern’s answer was jocular: “It’ll be good Jewish music.” That was the lullaby of Broadway so that even those who did not satisfy “halachic” (Jewish legal) standards adapted to the prevailing ethnic sensibility.12
In It Doesn’t Sound Jewish (How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced American Popular Music (2004), musicologist Jack Gottlieb traced Jewish musical elements in American popular songs. However, he did not specify the emergence of something like a Jewish musical style during this highly transformative historical moment within the United States.13 Considering this gap in the numerous studies on
the influence of Jews and Jewish culture upon American popular music, throughout this dissertation, I will attempt to reveal the consecration of such a musical style, drawing in part from Gottlieb’s work to examine examples and contribute new methods in part to distinguish the articulation of a Jewish musical style.
In this dissertation, I argue that in the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish and non-Jewish composers consciously or unconsciously constructed American popular songs that attended to a meaningful multi-faceted and far from static Jewish musical style. Especially during the late 1930s, the mainstream music industry consisted of prominent Jewish actors, from musicians and performers to publishers and booking agents. Within this industry, especially composers began to incorporate identifiable Jewish markers in their songs drawn from the conventions of synagogue music, Yiddish folksongs, and songs from the Yiddish theater. Further, this cross-cultural comparative study will demonstrate the presence of similarities between these musical elements from Jewish music in late nineteenth Russia and Eastern Europe, and mainstream popular songs in twentieth-century America. By examining the Jewish musical style, the present study presents a new perspective on the history of American popular song and provides tools for writing about songs in the eras of Tin Pan Alley, the Jazz Age, and the swing period.
Further, my arguments highlight the musicological contours of this style to uncover the changing harmonic, melodic, and motivic features which contributed to this style. In short, I argue that such a Jewish musical style first materialized as composers began to alter American popular music by shifting the affective connotation of songs in the minor mode from sad to happy and by adding their 1999), 62.
12 Ibid., 61.
13 Jack Gottlieb, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced American Popular Music (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004).
specific melodic motion.14 By 1927, songwriters increasingly composed songs in the
mid or fast-tempo minor mode, coined in this dissertation’s following analyses as the “happy minor.” Subsequently, in the mid-1930s, they developed a Jewish musical style in American popular songs through various techniques including the use of this happy minor in combination with small and large intervals; the insertion of room for an imaginary clap; and the frequent use of an intrinsic Bulgar rhythm. As a means of assimilation within American society, Jewish American songwriters incorporated these techniques within a broader frame of musical (and therefore cultural) code-switching, such as by alternating minor and major modes in the established sections of American popular song, the verse, chorus, bridge, and coda.
Beyond existing studies which present the panoply of cultural and ethnic influences within American popular music, including German, French, Italian, Irish, and African American musical styles, this study also argues that a Jewish musical style emerged in American popular songs in the first half of the twentieth century which related to the specific cultural, sociological, aesthetic and industrial context of growing music industry. To support this argument, the research is motivated by several questions that seek to better contextualize the emergence of such a culturally significant musical style. For example, how did the canon of Jewish music in Russia and Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth-century influence the music of Jews at the turn of the century in the New World? What were some identifiable musical elements of established Jewish music conventions and why were these relevant for developments within American popular music? Which characteristics of an expanding American popular song industry impacted Jewish music at the end of the nineteenth century? Which identifiable musical elements of early American popular song impacted the development of a Jewish musical style? Are there traces of Jewish musical elements within American popular songs in the early twentieth century? Ultimately, by addressing these questions, the dissertation seeks to illuminate and analyze a set of musical characteristics from Jewish music, which coalesced as a style within American popular songs in the first half of the twentieth century.
Since the term “Jewish musical style” does not yet exist in the vocabulary of popular music, I will attempt to legitimize its presence as a valid term within this dissertation by taking into account the chance of a predicted outcome as described by communication scholar Michael Sunnafrank.15 In his book Science, Jews and Secular
Culture, history scholar David Hollinger coined the “booster-bigot trap,” “that tempts the scholar to choose between the uncritical celebration of “Jewish contributions” and the malevolent complaint about Jewish influence.”16 In addition: the “falsification
method” of Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper drives scholars to face their 14 See for example Candelaria and Kingman 2012; Chase 1987; Crawford 2001; Ewen 1977; Hamm 1983; Starr et al. 2010.
15 Michael Sunnafrank, “Communicative Influences on Perceived Similarity and Attraction: An Expansion of the Interpersonal Goals Perspective.” The Western Journal of Speech Communication, 50, (Spring 1986), 158-170.
16 David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 11.
research from other perspectives. Concerning this study, one could ask: “Could there be an Italian, French, Greek or Irish musical style with these elements by immigrants in early twentieth-century America?” According to the Latvian musicologist and composer A.Z. Idelsohn:
Musical science teaches us that a musical selection dates and places its own origin by its elements and its form, just as art objects, antique and modern, relate their own history and explain their birthplace and the period in which they were created. So also does a tune, be it folk, popular or art music, bear the stamp of a certain period, being constructed out of musical elements belonging to a certain people in a certain country. Thus we can recognize a Slavic, German, Gypsy, Tartaric, or Spanish tune. A Gregorian chant will easily be distinguished from a Methodist hymn, and a tune by Schubert from an American jazz hit.17
To provide and proclaim a new style of music requires a serious and in-depth analysis from a variety of approaches. Only thorough and extensive research can shed light on this first attempt at finding something new, realizing that this field lies open for further research.
Hence, examining the constraints of a Jewish musical style requires a brief outline of the chapters. To begin, the title of this dissertation From Oy to Joy can be explained in many ways. “Oy” is a Yiddish exclamation of despair, grief, and complaint that can also be seen as a metaphor for Jews in Eastern Europe.18 “Joy”
is a metaphor for hope, happiness, and success in America. The title also stands in contradistinction between the Old World and the New World, Yiddish and English, and for the use of the minor and major modes. The subtitle Jewish Musical Style refers to the musical contributions of Jewish immigrants and their descendants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Jews at the end of the nineteenth century combined every phase of their lives with music, especially in the form of songs. They had prayers that were sung during the synagogue services, Sabbath songs (zemirot), blessings after meals that were sung (benschen), wordless songs (nigunim), wedding songs, children’s songs, and lullabies.19 With the term “musical style,” I mean to imply the
main characteristics of musical elements of the totality of a musical combination. By America, I mean the United States of America in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Popular Songs refer here to songs published in sheet music, radio, film, records, charts, or other media, songs emerging 17 A.Z. Idelsohn, “The Kol Nidre Tune” Hebrew Union College Annual 8-9, (1931-1932): 493-509, 496-7. 18 According to Leo Rosten oy is “the most expressive and ubiquitous exclamation/declamation in Yiddish.” Leo Rosten. The Joys of Yinglish (New York: Signet, 1992) 368.
19 See Philip V Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ruth Rubin, Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000, originally published: Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979); Henry Sapoznik, Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World (New York: Schirmer Trade Books, 1999); Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies vol. 8-10 (New York: Tara Publications, 1999. First published in 1923 by B. Harz in Berlin); Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music: Its Historical Development (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1992,. originally published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1929).
in a certain place and time, and generally liked (and purchased and listened to) by a certain group of people.
The period of the present study runs from the opening of Ellis Island as the port through which immigrants entered the country in 1892 until the end of the Second World War in 1945, which is also the end of the Swing Era. A chronological overview of popular songs influenced by the music of Jewish American immigrants and their descendants reveals the highs and lows of a Jewish musical style in the different popular song eras.
Following the methodology and literature review chapters, From Oy to Joy is divided into two parts. The first part takes place in the Old World, which consisted of the Russian Empire, the Pale of Settlement, and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. This part concentrates on the musical characteristics of the canon of Jewish music from a broad perspective. The second part deals with Jewish immigrants and their descendants, originating from the places in part one, into the New World, the United States of America in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Which music did they hear when they arrived in America? How did Jewish Americans assimilate into the New World through music, and have they brought musical marks from the Old World?
Chapter One examines the sacred side of Jewish music and takes place “inside,” such as in the synagogue and home. This chapter deals with established and conventional musical traits of cantillation, hazzanut, and songs and prayers at home. Contrary to the opinion of some Jewish music scholars, this chapter considers the reading of the Torah and the blasts of the shofar as music.
Chapter Two investigates the secular side of Jewish music, and mainly takes place “outside,” during weddings and on the street. However, religion also plays an important part in this chapter, especially considering the numerous songs about God, about learning the Torah, and the rabbi. Although Jewish art music is partly derived from Yiddish folksongs, this style provides many typical features of Jewish music and is, therefore, worthwhile to examine. The last section collects the musical characteristics of the previous sections, and distillates them into a taxonomy of Jewish music. Together, they represent an amalgamated musical heritage of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century.
Part Two opens in chapter three with a concise overview of the American popular “songscape” around 1890. This term refers to the various popular songs prominent within an era and geographical area. Jewish immigrants heard this songscape when they arrived in America. In this chapter, each musical style is given equal attention, and no one style is more important than another. From Stephen Foster’s songs and Sousa’s marches to African-American spirituals, chapter three tries to pinpoint the quintessential musical characteristics of each style. In order to be able to compare these to the music of Jewish immigrants, this chapter requires a thorough and broad perspective of what the American people have sung, heard, and played at the end of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Chapter Four focuses on the songs of the Jewish immigrants in the first two decades of twentieth-century America. With its origin in Russia and Eastern Europe, the Yiddish Theater connected Jewish immigrants with the language and customs of their homeland. As a form of entertainment after hard labor in sweatshops, Jews wrote numerous plays especially for this style of theater. In addition, the Yiddish theater mirrored the experiences of Jewish immigrants in their new homeland and reflected Jewish religion and traditions. Therefore, Yiddish theater was a tool for assimilation, while maintaining and adapting aspects of Jewish traditions. By singing and composing ‘Hebe’ and ‘Oriental’ songs, Jewish immigrants mocked themselves, whereby they made use of a stereotypical Jewish appearance, language, behavior, and music. Therefore, these ‘Hebe’ (satirizing Jews) and ‘Oriental’ songs delivered excellent information about quintessential Jewish music markers. From the synagogue to the concert hall, Jewish cantors became as famed as modern pop stars, and their concert hall performances frequently sold out. Because of their popularity, they also reached a non-Jewish audience. As an exemplary case study, this chapter examines the life and music of the young Irving Berlin, who at the age of only twenty, composed his first worldwide hit song “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which brought him prosperity but also stimulated his enduring and hybrid musical style.
Chapter Five deals with the emergence of jazz, and with the anti-Semitic articles produced by American industrialist Henry Ford about the presence and role of Jews in America’s popular music. What did Ford mean when he wrote that: “Jewish jazz becomes our national music?” Especially by examining this primary source material from the 1920s, Ford’s anti-Semitic articles offered his perspective of racial antagonism, while also indirectly betraying how Jews had transformed American popular music. Chapter Five also addresses issues of Jewish acculturation and assimilation such as is presented in the film The Jazz Singer.20 This 1927 film (the
first full-length feature film with sound) tells the story of a Jewish man who struggles with the choice between singing as a cantor in the synagogue and becoming a jazz singer. In reality, Jews who stepped into the mainstream theater designed ways to camouflage themselves, not as Jews, a minority, but as white Americans, or even in some cases as African-Americans. Jewish singer and actor Al Jolson used blackface in his role in The Jazz Singer, which was for many years common in minstrel shows.21
In the 1920s, Jewish composers and artists were predisposed to African-American jazz and blues with its rhythm, form, syncopation, and blue notes. As a result of analyzing songs in this period, the last section deals with five various moods of the minor mode, which appear in songs by Jewish composers. In this Jazz Age, especially in the entertainment industry and despite Prohibition, opportunities 20 See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 2013 20th anniversary edition); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish
Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
21 See Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Thomas L. Riis. Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890-1915 (Washington, London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); Eileen Southern. The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1971).
seemed boundless. However, this era came to a sudden end with the Wall Street crash of 1929. Such a demarcation also signaled a change in the tenor and harmonic output of an ever-transforming American popular style.
Chapter Six starts with songs of the Great Depression, focusing on the first half of the 1930s. The typical sad and nostalgic Jewish minor mode songs gave voice to the overall pessimistic mood of the many unemployed. With its Russian roots, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” became the American anthem of this downtrodden period. The second part of the 1930s reflected the immense popularity of swing music. Prior to World War II, large big bands played uplifting dance music, and with the credo “Swing is the thing,” America regained its optimism. In the second half of the 1930s, Jewish songwriters experienced something of a zenith because of the increased demand for songs. African-American performers such as singer Billie Holiday recorded many songs composed by Jewish composers. However, the absolute highlight of the Jewish contribution to American popular songs became the release of the former Yiddish theater song “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” sung by the Andrews Sisters (whose own background was Greek and Norwegian) with a Yiddish title, accommodated and updated the Jewish musical style. Because of its immense popularity, non-Jews also wanted to imitate this particular style. African-American artists such as Cab Calloway and Slim and Slam performed songs in the Jewish musical style with an American Yiddish accent and vocabulary. The American-Yiddish speech and its corresponding melody is the last topic of this chapter.
Set in the second half of the 1930s until the end of World War II in 1945, Chapter Seven addresses the revival of Jewish music from Russia and Eastern Europe and the emergence of neo-Jewish music. This chapter proceeds in two directions, one focusing on Yiddish film and the Jewish radio hour, while the other emphasizes Hollywood, American radio, and mainstream popular songs. Facing the annihilation of Jews in Europe, American Jews set up a Yiddish film industry in Poland to preserve Jewish life in the Old World. However, film directors produced these films from a Hollywood perspective and offered a pseudo-nostalgic atmosphere, which was far from authentic. Composers wrote music in a neo-Jewish musical style, combining musical traits from the Old World with Tin Pan Alley songs, even sometimes in a Broadway and Hollywood arrangement. Consequently, the Jewish radio hour became the reservoir of Jewish music in the broadest sense of the word, containing cantors singing, women singing (quite unusual in the orthodox Jewish world), Yiddish theater songs, Zionist songs, radio plays, comedians, and even the broadcast of bar mitzvahs and weddings.
In addition, African-American singers increasingly sought out songs of Jewish composers. Although Billie Holiday sang mainly songs by Jewish composers, the media and her fans considered her a blues singer. Furthermore, Cole Porter (who was not Jewish) turned to compose, what he called “Jewish tunes,” to gain in popularity. Examining these tunes contributed to the understanding of the Jewish musical style.
From Oy to Joy highlights a critical period in the emergence of a compelling, yet fluid musical style which germinated within the music of the Old World in the late
nineteenth century and spread and flourished within the songscape of the New World around the same time. Next to the many cultural impacts and expressions within America’s cosmopolitan popular culture, Jewish contributions to jazz, swing and popular music in the first half of the twentieth century demand great attention for their uniqueness and enduring quality within the history of American popular music. From Oy to Joy explores and lays claim to a “Jewish musical style,” by uncovering and analyzing specific musical traits that solidified into recognizable musical sound and practice. As in later decades, when blues, rock and roll, bebop, country, and rap became familiar mainstream genres, this Jewish musical style evolved into a familiar sound and influenced popular music in America and all over the Western world. Comparable with the Latin Tinge, the Jewish musical style, or maybe the “Jewish Tinge,” contributes to the understanding of popular music and the field of popular music studies.22
22 John Storm Roberts, The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, second edition, first published in 1979).
Methodology
1. Research Design
In all of these sources of Jewish music, Rodgers heard certain ever-present features of Jewish music, including a certain twisting or bending of notes. This twist in the notes is one of the hallmarks of Jewish music since ancient times. It is where one note seems to drop or fall quickly into the next note. Not only is it a feature that can be heard in listening to Jewish music, from Hebrew prayers to Yiddish folk songs, this relationship between musical notes can be seen when reading the sheet music for these songs.
– Jacqueline Bassan, 2002, 211
From Oy to Joy is a hybrid cross-cultural comparative study of the canon of Jewish music and the canon of American popular songs. Through ethnomusicological and empirical-analytical research, this study traces and highlights musical and stylistic similarities within Jewish musical forms between the Old World (Russia and Eastern Europe) and the New World (America). Cumulatively, this work offers three approaches: a historical case study with in-depth musical analysis, a comparative musicological study, and the codification of a dedicated methodological approach to identifying the shared characteristics of a Jewish musical style, which I refer to as the “song profile.” Such an approach towards mapping the relevance of a particular song profile within this unique cultural and aesthetic context has been previously implemented in popular music studies, but not in connection to a specifically Jewish musical style.1 My contribution to popular music and musical analysis more generally
is the “song profile,” or “song close-up,” which will be used to interpret the music and the history of songs in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century in relation to the emergence of this body of work.
This study particularly builds upon the research of Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood (2004) by Jack Gottlieb. In his book, Gottlieb described the Jewish musical influence via four different “A” routes: (1) Adaptations, (2) Adoptions, (3) Absorptions, and (4) Acculturation. Gottlieb explained, “Adaptation by musical transformations, adoption by musical quotations, absorption by musical anagrams and acculturation by way of an idiomatic musical formula.”2 However, instead of finding
one-to-1 Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968). Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicans: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Robert Falck and Timothy Rice ed. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Music (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1982). Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman ed., Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
one sources, as Gottlieb did, this research focuses on stylistic musical similarities. As an ongoing debate, the means of analyzing music has taken on different approaches. Using his “Schenkerian analysis,” music theorist Heinrich Schenker interpreted the underlying structure of music and consequently identified the deep structures and harmonic essences of a score according to this structure. Musicologist Philip Tagg applied “semiotics” to the fifty-second theme from Kojak, the television series.3 While musicologist Allan F. Moore unraveled music with “hermeneutics,”4
musicologist Stephen B. Jan discussed the theory of music according to “memetics.”5
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno provided a theory about the listener and the recognition of a popular song in his essay On Popular Music.6 Adorno stated:
An appropriate beginning for investigating recognition in respect of any particular song hit may be made by drafting a scheme which divides the experience of recognition into its different components. Psychologically, all the factors we enumerate are interwoven to such a degree that it would be impossible to separate them from one another in reality, and any temporal order given them would be highly problematical. Our scheme is directed more toward the different objective elements involved in the experience of recognition, than toward the way in which the actual experience feels to a particular individual or individuals.7
In his essays, however, Adorno attacked the growth of the popular music industry and the commodification of music. He especially criticized the repetitive character of popular songs. Consequently, Adorno considered the following components as overly applied within the formulas of a ‘hit song’: vague remembrance, actual identification, subsumption by label, self‐reflection on the act of recognition, and the psychological transfer of recognition‐authority to the object.8 Although Adorno implied a negative
critique via the implementation and recognition of these qualifications, some of these characteristics can be useful when incorporated into a broader comparative study such as in this research.
Many other related theoretical concepts apply to the present research, such as “cultural hybridity” (Burke), “creolization” (Spitzer), “syncretism” (Herskovits), 3 Philip Tagg, Kojak Fifty Seconds of Television Music Towards the Analysis of Affect in Popular Music (Dissertation. 1979. Second edition: New York, 2000). Tagg uses “musemes” to identify musical objects. 4 Allan F. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (London and New York: Routledge, 2016, first published by Ashgate Publishing, 2012).
5 Stephen B. Jan. The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007).
6 Theodor W. Adorno, with the assistance of George Simpson. On Popular Music. Third part: “Theory about the Listener.” Originally published in: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941), IX, 17-48.
7 Theodore W. Adorno, Essays on Music / Theodore W. Adorno: Selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert New Translations by Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2002), 453.
