A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (review)

Jeffrey Melnick's A Right to Sing the Blues is a relentlessly argued volume that seeks to expose the "myth" that Jews in the pre-1940s popular music business had a natural affinity for interpreting and producing Black music. Instead, Melnick sets forth the thesis that Jews like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin skillfully manipulated their own racial identity to maximize their marketability as purveyors of popular song, elbowing out "real" Black Americans in the process. The primary techniques that musical Jews used to perform this artistic transmogrification was to "sacralize" jazz music by dousing it with a superficial cantorial style and to shroud themselves in Jewish spiritual melancholy. In this way these Jews gave the savvy (but false) impression that the liturgical music of the Jewish past led them to write and perform adaptations of similarly pathos- ridden Black popular music. "As with later attempts to interpret the presence of Jews in the civil rights movement as the natural yield of Jewish prophetic tradition, the process of sacralization in popular music operated from the assumption that Jewishness had immense characterological significance even for the most secular Jews" (p. 169). The worst part about this whole charade, according to Melnick, was that it hid the financial opportunism that really powered the drive of Jews toward Black musical forms. "The religious overtones of this expressive mode deflected notice from the profit-making interest of the secular Jew in the music business and from the loss of piety of contemporary Jews" (p. 175).

Melnick is a keen interpreter of popular culture, but he relies mostly on rumor and innuendo to bolster serious charges of Jewish exploitation. Without any hard analysis of record company data or discussion of the economic plight of performing artists during the period under discussion, Melnick reiterates and extrapolates from a string of unverified charges: that the Jewish Witmark Brothers stole an original melody from Ernie Hogan, giving it the degrading title "All Coons Look Alike to Me"; that Isidore Witmark refused to publish the works of Will Marion Cook after Cook demanded a recalculation of his royalty statement from the 1898 musical Clorindy, which Witmark produced; that "rumor had it that Fats Waller once sold a song to Irving Berlin for $25" (p. 34); that Irving Berlin stole the melody for "Alexander's Ragtime Band" from Scott Joplin; and that Irving Berlin kept "a little colored boy" in his closet, who wrote many of his songs. In the case of Berlin, Melnick applies a lethal dose of postmodern interpretation. In a 1916 article, Berlin responded to the rumor of the "little colored boy" by saying "If they could produce the negro and he had another hit like 'Alexander' in his system, I would choke it out of him and give him twenty thousand dollars in the bargain" (p. 117). For Melnick, though, whether the phantom "little colored boy" ever really existed is less important than the rumor's symbolic "truth." "Whatever his [Berlin's] personal relationship to this postulated ghostwriter . . . the central message of this anecdote is that Jews were unfairly exploiting African Americans and their music" (p. 118).

When it comes to American Jews, this book, as with the bulk of the "whiteness" scholarship it is a part of, veers wide of the mark. Whiteness scholarship seeks to demonstrate that the mobility of European immigrant groups resulted primarily from the putative benefits of achieving white racial status, a status unavailable to Blacks. According to Melnick, the sacralization of jazz by Jews "did not highlight intergroup contact-for good or bad-but instead effaced African Americans [and] contributed to the rising status of Jews as they became white ethnics" (pp. 188-189). But focusing on the uniformity of white privilege and Black deprivation requires that any exceptions to the rule be ignored or under emphasized...