Over the holidays this year, my two favorite
aesthetic encounters were somewhat complementary: David Lehman's new book on
Jewish composers and Mick Moloney's new CD on Irish-Jewish musical
collaborations. Both projects are
brilliant in their distinct ways, and offer a torrent of insight and argument
that I'm sure will fuel discussion for years to come. Lehman's A Fine
Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook/Schocken) and
Moloney's If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews (Compass Records) both
address complex issues of music and history with nuance, authority, and deep
personal knowledge.
David Lehman, the co-host of this very site, is a
polymath of impressive accomplishment, but I was unaware of the extent of his
knowledge of popular music, which is prodigious. His goal in this book is set out on its first
page: "…to explain what is Jewish about American popular song. A lot has
to do with sound: the minor key, bent notes, altered chords, a melancholy edge." The story of how Jewish artists,
often immigrants, came to write music that helped define modern America—from
"White Christmas" to "God Bless America"—is a remarkable
one. Irving Berlin, George Gershwin,
Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein,
Richard Rodgers, Sammy Cahn,
Frank Loesser, and others, are all vividly brought to life in this book.
A
Fine Romance has a sound (npi) scholarly foundation,
but also abounds with stories,
anecdotes, one-liners, and gossip, as befits a saga about a group of such colorful
and creative souls, these "…young Jewish geniuses who wanted to
re-create themselves as Americans and wound up re-creating American culture in
the process." It is also a very personal book, and, in fact,
I wish Dr. Lehman had given us even more of a memoir: "It was the songbook
to which I responded, not the Jewish identity of its authors, though this was a
source of pride for me, the son of refugees. Let's put it this way: Every time
someone in a movie sings "Hello Mr. Cohen/ How's it goin'?" is a
minor victory for the Jewish people. To me it remains a source of endless
wonderment and speculation that certain Jewish immigrants or their American-born
children managed to re-create whole parts of American culture." That sense of personal passion pervades this
book.
[George Gershwin, below; Irving Berlin, above]
I will leave it to the ethnomusicologists to assess
David's thesis regarding the symbiotic relationship between Jewish and
African-American music. I don't know
enough about it. But his argument is
provocative: "Let's begin, then,
with the mysterious 'blueness' and 'crazy' jazz that links Jewish songwriters
tonally and rhythmically with black singers and instrumentalists." / "You can paraphrase the debate about
jazz, race, and religion crudely in a pair of rhetorical questions. Did the
Jews or the African-Americans get there first, where 'there' refers to the holy
land of jazz and swing? Who ripped off whom?" [One final comment—though many individual
songs and artists are discussed, and even one
playlist of crucial 1930s music is proposed, there is, unfortunately, no
photo section or bound-in CD in A Fine
Romance. I don't think it would take
the book's author too much time to assemble a photo album and a mega-list of
the key songs under discussion, with recommendations as to specific versions–that
one could put together via iTunes for, say, $20—and put it all up here or on
some other appropriate site.]
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I recently wrote a little Amazon review
("Hebraic Hibernianism") of Mick Moloney's If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews in which I call him, I
think very justly (and excuse me for quoting myself), "the preeminent curator of a nearly lost world of
Irish-American music." Dr. Moloney
is probably the best-known and most influential figure in the world of
Irish-American music. A virtuoso tenor-banjo player, singer, guitarist, record
producer, impresario, and scholar, he has, with his last two albums, shifted
his attention for now from his lifelong interest in traditional music to the
more commercial world of the 19th and 20th centuries. McNally's
Row of Flats, which came out in 2006, focuses on the compositions of the
brilliant Ned Harrigan (1844–1911), who, with his partner Tony Hart,
practically invented American musical theater in the late 19th century. With this new recording, Moloney takes us
into the 20th century, to the early Tin Pan Alley era (from about 1880 to 1920),
a period of fertile collaborations between New York's Irish and Jewish
musicians and song-writers. (In a way, this era sets the stage for the golden age of Jewish music that followed, as outlined in A Fine Romance.) There are
all kinds of shifting identities among this flamboyant cast of
characters—William Jerome (originally Flannery) "changed his name when
he saw the songwriting business switching from Irish to Jewish," while
Norah Bayes, who cultivated an Irish audience with such hits as "Has
Anybody Here Seen Kelly?," was originally Norah Goldberg. The list goes
on.
[below: Norah Bayes; George M. Cohan; above: Harrigan & Hart]
"These Irish/Jewish collaborations,"
Moloney writes, "came at a time when the primacy of the Irish on the
American stage was beginning to wane. Throughout the century, the Irish and
their descendants had been hugely influential figures in the creation of a
uniquely American popular culture. Indeed, the story of Irish music in 19th
century America is a major part of the story of American music itself during
that time." [For a beautifully
written and researched exposition of this thesis, see William H. A. Williams's
landmark 1996 book 'Twas Only an
Irishman's Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular
Song Lyrics, 1800–1920.] This CD, however, is more than an archaeological musical
dig; it is a resurrection, a re-creating of some truly wonderful material. Featured on the CD are not only such leading
traditional players as Billy McComiskey, Joannie Madden, and John Doyle, but
Vince Giordano & the Nighthawks, who specialize in big band arrangements
that bring this earlier music to life.
"I hope,"
says Moloney, "that this small collection of songs will show in some
modest measure the diversity and general joviality of that vastly unappreciated
part of American musical history."
I think his hopes are met.