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

Chapter 5: The Wandering Gypsy

88 chapter 5 The Wandering Gypsy Rose: “You name a big city and we’ve played it!” Louise: “Grandpa says we’ve covered the country like Gypsies!” arthur laurents, Gypsy, Act II Acculturation–By Way of an Idiomatic Musical Formula L ola’s siren song from Damn Yankees (see Ex. 4-16c) contains a cluster of notes that rotate on the dominant axis of the key—that is, on the fifth note: “Whatever Lola wants Lo. . . .” This inverted S turn (⬃) is a seductive swivel , and, in fact, is a cliché in Slavic and Russian-Gypsy music. To wit, from Dvor̆ák’s Second Slavonic Rhapsody: “Otchi chorniya” (Dark Eyes, Ex. 5-2a), the Russian-gypsy ballad—derived from a waltz possibly written by a Jew (not clear)1 —begins with this motif. Originally a cabaret number, “Dark Eyes” became so widespread that songwriters could not resist taking potshots at it (Ex.5- 2b): In 1940, Russian-born L. Wolfe Gilbert, author of “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,” wrote a parody of “Di Greene Koseene” [sic] that had Otchi chorniya in its lyric, further proof that Russian sources were often identified with Yiddish exporters: Can she sing that Greene my koseene?/Orchy chornya [sic]with a concertina, Dances very light just like a feather,/Lots of times we finish both together. Can she cook that Greene my koseene?/Anything excepting pork and beene, She can make a noodle soup with luckshn,/Looking like an M.G.M. production. In “Could You Use Me?”—from Gershwin’s Girl Crazy (1930)—the leading lady envisions an ideal suitor, “There is one in Cal-i-for-ni-a/More roman-tic far than you/When he sings ‘Ha-cha-cha-chor-ni-a’/I often think he’ll do.”2 The music uses the motive of “Otchi Chorniya” on the italicized syllables, but not on the dominant pivot of the key. The film world was particularly enamored of “Otchi Chorniya,” quoting it extensively in movies ranging from Paul Whiteman’s band in King of Jazz (1930) to Gloria Jean’s girlish warbling in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) to Kathryn Grayson’s patrician coloratura in It Happened in Brooklyn (1947). As recently as 1999, the durable ballad appeared in Taxman, another Brooklyn film, this one about the Russian mafiosi in the Brighton Beach quarter. Spike Jones did “Hotcha Cornia,” a zany spoof in Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943). Fred Astaire, playing a pretender-Russian, greets Ginger Rogers in the 1937 Gershwin film Shall We Dance? with a thick-accented salutation of “Otchi chorniya.” As a music box tune, the ballad supplies an important plot point in the classic 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film comedy The Shop Around the Corner.3 Even Louis Armstrong got into the act and recorded it Dixieland style, rhyming chorniya with caldonia (the latter alluding to Fleecie Moore’s 1945 hit title). A doleful Russian ballad from the repertoire of “Harry Horlick and His A & P Gypsies”—a radio performing group from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s—also toys with this twisting figuration. (An English version of this ballad was sung by Marina Koshetz in the 1946 film No Leave, No Love.) (The highpoint of Ex. 5-3 corresponds to a cadential leitmotif—the interval of a descending 4th followed by the step of a 2nd—prominently associated in synagogue music with the High Holy Days and other major Jewish holidays.4 ) The gypsy motif traveled from Moscow to Berlin, where Kurt Weill embraced it in a song from The Threepenny Opera, which also peaks with the Jewish leitmotif (Ex. 5-4a). In another Threepenny Opera number, Weill inverts the order of the two groupings, first the Jewish holiday leitmotif and then, five bars later, the gypsy motive (Ex. 5-4b): the wandering gypsy 89 From the city of Berlin the gypsy peregrinator journeyed to Paris where it made camp in a song by Norbert Glantzberg that was popularized by Edith Piaf: A partial echo of all this wandering from country to country can be heard as far back as the so-called Tonus Peregrinus (Wandering Tone) of the Roman rite:5 A documentary filmmaker points out:“Gypsies and Jews [in the Carpathian mountains of Ukraine] were treated like pariahs . . . Gypsies learned Yiddish and Jews learned the Gypsy language, Romani. And there was plenty of cross-fertilization musically.”6 Jewish Middle Eastern modes coupled...