Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood

Chapter 8: Bits and Pieces

chapter 8 Bits and Pieces Instead of the burdens of the chosen people there were now the exhilarations of a choosing one. ted solotaroff, “American-Jewish Writers: On Edge Once More,” New York Times, 18 December 1988 A melody’s opening, like first impressions of people, is often the most memorable part of a tune. The motive that introduces the main theme of the background score to the 1960 film The Apartment (Ex. 8-1a) is a case in point. But this same motive can also be found inside a tune. For example, in a famous Stephen Sondheim song of 1973, it appears at the end of the first full phrase (Ex. 8-1b). Similarly, David Baker finishes a phrase in an obscure song from an equally unknown 1961 show, Smiling, the Boy Fell Dead (Ex. 8-1c): By now it should be apparent that much of Jewish folk, theater and traditional synagogue song is also tailored by stitching such scraps and shreds of melody together. The chanter (Ba’al Tefila or Prayer Leader) has a stockpile of inherited motives, bits and pieces from which he threads his melodies. But these are not random choices. Experience dictates which musical fragments work best with each other, a tried and true repository of melodic snatches from which whole cloth melodies are woven. In a nonreligious context, one sample of a linkage that gets recycled in different environments is the melodic unfolding of the notes that make up the dominant 7th chord. We find this in bridge sections as divergent as Irving Berlin’s “The Song Is Ended” from Tin Pan Alley, a 1934 song from the Yiddish film Mamele (Mommy), and a song from Broadway, in The Pajama Game of 1954: 145 Another Yiddish mama song of 1954 uses the same dominant 7th linkage (Ex. 83a ), echoed in a tango from The Pajama Game (Ex. 8-3b): When Berlin starts off a ballad from the show Call Me Madam with this same broken chord as an incipit, it sounds as if he is beginning in midsection. It is, in its way, a daring choice, starting as it does with the dominant 7th of E Minor and concluding in the distant key of C Major. A more common linkage from Yiddish songs undergoes an odd conversion when it gets transported into American surroundings. The primary feature of this connective phrase is a kind of yodel on the 7th step with a raised half tone on the 4th step. Jewish prototypes can be ascertained first in a folk song about a female, and then in a Yiddish theater song, also about a young woman:1 146 funny, it doesn’t sound jewish HOM, vol. IX, No. 607 “Di grine kuzine” (The Green Female Cousin), based on an older dance tune, was a huge success on the Yiddish variety circuit and underwent several adaptations . However, there is little evidence that its characteristic linkage (see “Sheyn vi gold” in Ex. 8-5b) made a successful transplant because it—like the interval of the augmented 2nd—would have made the music sound “too Jewish.” Curiously, later printed song-sheet versions smoothed out the Jewishness of the original—at least as compared to the recording by its composer—by removing the so-called Ukrainian raised 4th step. Even the best of the adaptations—“My Little Cousin” by Happy Lewis, Sam Braverman, and Cy Coben—does not make a comfortable adjustment, though it was recorded by the likes of song stylist Mildred Bailey and by Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman. This fox-trot could not hold a candle to the pithy irony of the original Yiddish as it bitterly traced the disintegration of the rosycheeked maiden to a sallow woman, old before her time: “Years have past, my cousin became a mess/Now when I meet her and I ask her how she is, she answers: ‘To hell with Columbus’s land!’” A song from the Broadway show On a Clear Day You Can See Forever by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner uses another form of the dominant chord, this time in the minor mode. Originally written for a musical set in Israel, to be produced by David Merrick and directed by Joshua Logan, Lane confirmed the tune’s Jewish origins: Years earlier when I was working on Finian’s Rainbow I had an idea of doing a musical based on Israel becoming an independent state...