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Jewish Songwriters, American SongsExplore more photos from the story |
By 1926, Cole Porter had already written several Broadway scores, “none of which had, well, scored,” poet and critic David Lehman points out. But one enchanted evening that year, while dining in Venice with Noël Coward, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Porter confided that he had finally figured out the secret to writing hits. “I’ll write Jewish tunes,” he said.
“Rodgers laughed at the time,” Lehman writes in his new book, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Schocken/Nextbook), “but looking back he realized that Porter, was serious and had been right.” The minor-key melodies of such famed Porter tunes as “Night and Day,” “Love For Sale” and “I Love Paris” are “unmistakably eastern Mediterranean,” Rodgers wrote in Musical Stages, his autobiography.
Porter’s songs may have had a Yiddish lilt to them, but they are squarely within the mainstream of the great American songbook: that wonderful torrent of songs that enlivened the nation’s theaters, dance halls and airwaves between World War I and the mid-1960s. What’s more, as Lehman acknowledges, many of the top songwriters—Cole Porter included—were not Jewish. Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, George M. Cohan, Fats Waller, Andy Razaf, Walter Donaldson and Jimmy McHugh come to mind right away.
And yet it is a remarkable fact that Jewish composers and lyricists produced a vastly disproportionate share of the songs that entered the American canon. If you doubt this, consider, for example, a typical playlist of popular holiday records—all of them by Jewish songwriters (with the exception of Kim Gannon): “White Christmas” (Irving Berlin); “Silver Bells” (Jay Livingston and Ray Evans); “The Christmas Song,” a.k.a. “Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire” (Mel Tormé); “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” (Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne); “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (Johnny Marks); and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” (Walter Kent, Kim Gannon and Buck Ram). Warble any number of popular tunes, say “Summertime” (George and Ira Gershwin), “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” (Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach) or “A Fine Romance” (Kern and Dorothy Fields)—and it’s the same story. Then of course, there are the Broadway musicals, from Kern’s Show Boat to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific to West Side Story, by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.
Lehman, 61, editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the annual Best American Poetry series, has been captivated by this music and its ingenious lyrics since childhood. “It was the songbook to which I responded, not the Jewish identity of its authors,” he writes, “though this was a source of pride to me, the son of refugees.” A Fine Romance, then, reads as a sort of love letter from a contemporary poet to a generation of composers and wordsmiths; from a devoted son to his late parents, who escaped the Nazi onslaught just in time, as his grandparents had not; and finally, to America itself, which allowed the great songwriters and the author himself to flourish in a world of freedom and possibility unlike anything their families had left behind. Lehman spoke with writer Jamie Katz.
Songs like Irving Berlin’s "God Bless America" and Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s "Over the Rainbow" virtually defined a national ethos. Do you feel the Jewish songwriters created a kind of religion of American-ness?
In a way they did. Many were the children or grandchildren of people who escaped from the pogroms of Europe and other depredations, and reinvented themselves as Americans. In the process they kind of reinvented America itself as a projection of their ideals of what America could be. We have a secular religion in the United States that transcends all individual religions. This is not entirely an unmixed blessing, but I think that’s exactly what the songwriters were doing.
You talk about how popular song helped uplift and unify Americans through the crises of the 1930s and ‘40s. On a more subtle level, you suggest that Jewish songwriters were pressing back against the forces that sought to annihilate them. How so?
There are many examples of Depression-era songs that staked out common ground in hard times, like "On the Sunny Side of the Street" or "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime"—often with a mixture of melancholy and resolute good cheer. In 1939 you get The Wizard of Oz, a fantasy about this magical land over the rainbow, on the other side of the Depression. With Oklahoma! in 1943, at the height of the war, when the chorus picks up Curly’s refrain—We know we belong to the land / And the land we belong to is grand!—you feel this great surge of patriotism. "God Bless America" made its debut on the radio with Kate Smith on November 11, 1938, exactly 20 years after the armistice ending World War I. And it was the same day that people read the newspapers about the terrible pogrom known as Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria. While the two had no direct relation, it's impossible to see the two facts as entirely unconnected. Irving Berlin created a song that people authentically like and turn to in time of crisis, as in the days after 9/11/01. The Nazis did battle not only with tanks and well-trained soldiers and the Luftwaffe. They also had a cultural ideology, and we needed something for our side to fight back. That song was one way that we fought back.
Comments
I am researching the connection between Judaism and opera. Many of the writers and composers you refer to are Jewish and composed operas such as West Side Story (Bernstein), Sweeney Todd (Sondheim), Showboat (Kern), Porgy and Bess (Gershwin.) Can you comment about this relationship, and also how anti-semitism must have affected the Jewish stimulus to compose operas during the 19th Century, the era of Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini to name a few? How did the Jews control their musical ideas during these years. Other than Halevy, Meyerbeer, Rubinstein, Weill, Korngold, Schoenberg, Dukas and Offenbach there are no Jewish Opera composers of note.
Posted by Samuel Wolpert on October 8,2009 | 06:08 PM
Actually, "The only work that really brings enjoyment...,"
could be a paraphrase from the Ecclesiastical text in the Old Testament where Solomon speaks about work as "good," and to be enjoyed.
If Arlen and Berlin were the sons of cantors, would they not be familiar with these texts?
This is a beautiful article. I plan to use the music and the excellent history in my teaching. Thank you, Smithsonian!
Posted by Lynda Burgess on October 12,2009 | 12:51 PM
Reply to Samuel Wolpert:
You raise interesting questions. The interview, and, to a much greater extent, David Lehman's book, do take up the issue of why Jewish songwriters flourished in the United States, a society that has incubated musical genius of many stripes.
I have no special expertise in the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to great opera in Europe in the 19th century. The Italians were clearly dominant in that era, so the list of Jewish composers you cite seems to me fairly impressive, given their minority status and the prejudices some if not all of them undoubtedly encountered. For many Western European Jews, emancipation had only recently been achieved, through the influence of Napoleon and the more liberal temperament that arose in his wake. I wonder, too, about the extent to which aspiring Jewish artists may contended with the traditional strictures of their own communities and families—the very theme of Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer.
I have run across references to a book you may want to check out, if you haven't already: Diana R. Hallman's Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Halévy's La Juive (Cambridge University Press).
Thank you for your interest.
Posted by Jamie Katz on October 14,2009 | 11:32 PM
Magnificent interview!
Posted by Lewis Saul on January 14,2010 | 01:35 AM