Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 6.251
March 3, 1997

1) Yiddish music in a 'race' film (Ellen Prince)
2) Yiddish music in a 'race' film (Ron Robboy)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 02 Mar 1997 12:50:01 EST
From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu
Subject: Yiddish music in a 'race' film

many thanks to harold orbach for the information about that yiddish
number in a black film -- very interesting! of course i knew that jews
and blacks interacted a good deal (my mother was born and raised in
harlem, btw) but i wouldn't have expected a yiddish song in a film
made for black consumption. ya never know... :)

ellen prince

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 1997 01:58:00 -0800
From: rrobboy@cts.com
Subject: Yiddish music in a 'race' film

Harold L. Orbach [6.249] writes that _The Black Network_, the "race
film" with Yiddish music Ellen Prince [6.245] reported seeing, was
copyright 1936 ("mcmxxxvi") by Vitaphone.  (It is confusing, however,
that he gives a subtitle of "1945-1946.")

Saul Chaplin, in his recent memoir _The Golden Age of Movie Musicals
and Me_ (Norman, Oklahoma:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1994, 262
pp.), describes the year or two he and his songwriting partner Sammy
Cahn worked at Vitaphone cranking out novelty tunes.  It was in
November 1937, while they were working at Vitaphone, that their song
"Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" was recorded by the Andrews Sisters, becoming
a huge commercial hit by the end of that year.  The song was
originally written, of course, in 1932 by Sholom Secunda and Jacob
Jacobs for singers Aaron Lebedeff and Lucy Levin in the show _M'ken
lebn nor m'lozt nit_ (also known as "I Would If I Could") at the
Rolland Theater; and there are as many versions of the story of how
the English-language version came to be as there were participants in
the affair.  Secunda's daughter-in-law fills an entire chapter with
several such versions in her book, Victoria Secunda, _Bei Mir Bist Du
Schoen:  The Life of Sholom Secunda_ (Weston, Connecticut:  Magic
Circle Press, 1982, 271 pp.).

The differences between the various versions are not minor.  But one
piece of information that both Cahn and Chaplin seem to agree upon is
that, along with their manager Lou Levy, they heard the song being
done in Harlem by black performers at the Apollo Theater -- IN
YIDDISH.  Both men report being astounded at how good it was and how
it captivated what I presume was a largely black audience.  Cahn, I
believe, identified the performers as a duo called Johnny and George,
and Victoria Secunda says Johnny and George had learned the song from
Jennie Grossinger, the famous Catskill hotel owner.

What Chaplin has added to a now substantial genealogy surrounding this
song is that an arrangement they made after hearing it that night in
Harlem was languishing on their piano top for some amount of time
after the bandleader Tommy Dorsey had turned it down.  (Some versions
of this part of the story indicate that it may have been for as long
as two years.)  By late 1937, Patti, LaVerne, and Maxene Andrews,
three Greek-Norwegian sisters from Minnesota, came and auditioned at
Vitaphone, where Chaplin, Cahn, and manager Levy discovered them.
(They were scouting for Decca Records on the side.)  The three New
Yorkers had the three Minnesotans stay at their apartment during the
day while they went to work at Vitaphone.  (That's his story -- I'm
only reporting it.)  Chaplin then goes on to say the sisters simply
chanced across the manuscript lying on the piano while he and Cahn
were literally at the Vitaphone studio one day.  The sisters made
their own arrangement, and went with manager Levy to Decca Records to
record it. (Apropos Orbach's question of what is a "true" race film,
according to Victoria Secunda, Maxene Andrews reported that, upon
hearing the recording session in progress, the head of Decca demanded,
"What are you making, a race record?"  He was referring, of course, to
the Yiddish song.)

Looking at the 1936 (if that is correct?) film copyright Orbach
reports in the light of this new account of Cahn and Chaplin's day
job, I find myself wondering if the Washboard Serenaders/Ochi Chornia
sequence was a Cahn-Chaplin arrangement -- a way they made use of
their original idea, the one turned down by Dorsey.  Because Vitaphone
found it cheaper to pay Chaplin and Cahn for new tunes than to
purchase rights for previously published ones (Chaplin says), they
would have had to write a new tune or, easier still, arrange one in
the public domain.  _Ochi chornia_ could not have been more ideal.
Thus it seems entirely plausible to me that the routine that amazed
Ellen Prince represents an early spin-off of Cahn and Chaplin's first
efforts with "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen."

Vitaphone, incidentally, was the subsidiary of Warner Brothers film
studio that had developed the "talkie" (sound) film ten years earlier.
The first talkie, with sound sequences recorded at Vitaphone, was _The
Jazz Singer_ (1927), which features a different permutation but
strangely resonant conflation of these same elements of Yiddish and
Afro-American musical culture.  The story, briefly, is a about a
cantor's son who is disowned for singing popular, syncopated music.
When the khazn is too ill to sing Kol Nidre, the son rushes back to
take the place of his dying father, they atone, and he then fulfills
his destiny as a commercial singer in blackface, winning back his
proud mother and his shikse.  The soundtrack includes, among a variety
of musical resources, Jewish musical sequences, both secular and
liturgical.  The film opens with a montage of the Lower East Side.

Ron Robboy

______________________________________________________
End of Mendele Vol. 6.251

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