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193 chapter 12 Affinities Between Jewish Americans and African Americans Jews have stolen the Negroes’ thunder . . . Tin Pan Alley has become a commercialized Wailing Wall. constant lambert in Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline, p. 212 Jews [were] responsible for perverting “authentic” African American music. jeffrey melnick in A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song, p. 151 Debunking Canards S ixty-five years separate the first epigraph above (1934) from the second one (1999), but there is a big difference in how these accusations are presented. Constant Lambert is rightly condemned, even by Jeffrey Melnick, as an arrant anti-Semite; and he remained unrepentant as late as 1948—post war, post Holocaust—when he declared in the preface to the third edition of his infamous book: I am content to leave it as such, making no attempt to soften out the more controversial passages which may read surprisingly enough today when there seems to be a general view that all forms of culture are on the right side and should therefore be praised. In other words, he was not about to change a word in his invective against Jews. Melnick, however, is too cagey to be charged with bigotry. By using voices like Lambert’s to convey his message, he circumvents such an indictment. The excerpt from his book quoted above is preceded by a passage from the writings of AfricanAmerican1 essayist Alain Locke: The very musicians who know the folk-ways of Negro music are the very ones who are in commercial slavery to the Shylocks of Tin Pan Alley (in artistic bondage to the ready cash of our dance-halls and the vaudeville stage).2 But it is not altogether clear if Melnick’s remark is his own or a gloss on Locke’s contentions since the entire book comes across as a study (an exposé?) of how Jews capitalized on blacks, made money off them, and took credit for their work. Louis Armstrong would not have agreed with this assessment. From his oral history comes the statement, “If it wasn’t for the nice Jewish people, we would have starved many a time. I will love the Jewish people all of my life.” Armstrong’s account of his childhood refutes an earlier story that “People thought my first horn was given to me at a colored waif’s home for boys [reformatory-cum-orphanage], but it wasn’t.” Armstrong was taken under the wing of the Karnoffskys, a New Orleans Jewish family which “inadvertently became one of the earliest and most important incubators of American jazz.” He earned pennies helping the two Karnoffsky sons as they made their rounds as junk dealers. To gain the notice of customers, young Louis taught himself how to play simple tunes on a crude tencent tin horn. The Karnoffskys were most encouraging and soon advanced a loan on his salary for him to procure a five-dollar cornet from a pawn shop. After having dinner with the family, before the nighttime junkets on the wagon, Louis joined in as Mrs. Karnoffsky sang a baby to sleep with “Russian Lullaby.” (Armstrong’s memory is in error here. It could not have been Berlin’s 1927 song of the same title—which Armstrong recorded three times: 1949, 1950, and 1953— despite the fact that lyrics of the Berlin verse are quoted in his testimony.) In the most extraordinary statement of all, he declared, “when I reached the age of eleven [1912], I began to realize it was the Jewish family who instilled in me singing from the heart.”3 Reprehensible as they are, at least Constant Lambert’s remarks—along with similar commentaries by miscreants Daniel Gregory Mason, Henry Ford,4 and others —can be judged in the context of their fermenting times, an era when Americans were striving, especially through the popular arts, to find themselves. But how to account for Melnick’s position at the end of the century? Can it be justified as a symptom of the cultural revisionist movements of recent decades? Paul Berman reminds us of Freud’s postulation that “racial intolerance finds stronger expression, strange to say, in regard to small differences than to fundamental ones.” Resentments smolder when similarities, rather than precise identities, are perceived by the injured party. In terms of music, this means that if a piece seems like another , it is prima facie incriminating evidence.5 The 1990s were marked by ever-increasing divisiveness between...

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