Jews, Race and Popular Music

Jon Stratton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351561693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Jon Stratton provides a pioneering work on Jews as a racialized group in the popular music of America, Britain and Australia during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than taking a narrative, historical approach the book consists of a number of case studies, looking at the American, British and Australian music industries. Stratton's primary motivation is to uncover how the racialized positioning of Jews, which was sometimes similar but often different in each of the societies under consideration, affected the kinds of music with which Jews have become involved. Stratton explores race as a cultural construction and continues discussions undertaken in Jewish Studies concerning the racialization of the Jews and the stereotyping of Jews in order to present an in-depth and critical understanding of Jews, race and popular music.

Chapter 1
‘Moanin’ Low’:
Jews, Whiteness and Torch Singing

Today, it is much commented on that many prominent Jewish performers in the early years of the twentieth century appeared in blackface. Some of the most significant discussion has been of Al Jolson, especially his blackface performance in the first talkie, the 1927 film of Samson Raphaelson’s play The Jazz Singer. However, Jolson was never again to achieve the success he enjoyed with that film. In this chapter, I will argue that, structurally speaking, the Jewish use of blackface was closely connected with dominant American and, more generally, English-speaking understandings of race and the situation of Jews in the racial order during the second half of the nineteenth century. At this time, much racial thinking suggested that Jews were, in some sense, black; as a group, they were connected with the black race and, therefore, with African Americans. However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Jews came to be racially positioned quite differently. Rather than being thought to be black, they were increasingly positioned as a race on the fringe of the white races. In this context, I will argue, the Jewish use of blackface became increasingly less meaningful and more anachronistic. As we shall see, through the 1920s and 1930s, Jews, and the recently whitened Irish, established and dominated a new form of entertainment known as the torch song, in addition to that form of presentation allied to the torch song, torch singing.

The first torch song is generally considered to be ‘My Man’, the anglicized version of the French chanson ‘Mon Homme’, first presented on stage by Fanny Brice in Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1921. As we shall see, this identification must be unsettled. One of the most typifying performances of a torch song was Libby Holman’s presentation of ‘Moanin’ Low’ in The Little Show in 1929. The Jewish Holman and other torch singers such as the Irish-background Helen Morgan were considered to be exotic.¹ They were thought of as not black but not quite white, or, in comparative terms, not as white as the whites who defined whiteness. At the same time, Holman, Morgan, and even Sophie Tucker, had voices and vocal styles, which led white people who had only heard their records to think these singers were black.² And indeed, some of the most well-known torch singers of the era, most notably Ethel Waters and, in the 1930s and 1940s, Billie Holiday, were black. While nobody thought these singers sounded white, their choice of songs was linked with Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, and considered to be white—though most, if not all of these, such as Waters’s ‘Am I Blue’, co-written by Harry Akst in 1929, were composed by Jews. Angela Yvonne Davis, referring somewhat disparagingly to these songs, writes of ‘Holiday’s remarkable ability as a jazz vocalist to appropriate inconsequential love songs—which without her intervention probably would have ended up in Tin Pan Alley trash cans—as occasions for evoking and exploring complex emotional meanings.’³ All these singers occupied a racial borderland. For these ‘white’ Jewish and Irish singers, and those who looked and sounded like them, such as Lee Morse, their whiteness, albeit marginal, was reaffirmed.

In one respect, though, it is important to understand torch singing as having a continuity with blackface and with the minstrel performance out of which Jewish blackface evolved. Often, authors today associate coon shouting with coon songs and, indeed, think of coon shouting as the term used to describe someone singing coon songs. As we shall see, this is a crucially inaccurate description. ‘Coon shouting’ referred to the use of a variety of vocal techniques, the purpose of which was to enhance the expressive intensity of the singing performance. These techniques ranged from increasing the voice’s natural vibrato and using falsetto to the addition of non-linguistic elements such as screams and moans. From a white, middle-class American point of view, these techniques were to be found in African-American singing, though they can also be found being used by other groups around the world. In the decade around the turn of the twentieth century, singers, however they were identified racially, who were called coon shouters were those who made use of these techniques; and torch songs had lyrics that encouraged, and a musical structure that enabled, this usage. Again, as will be discussed later, aside from African Americans it was those singers, Jewish and Irish, whose connection to whiteness was considered tenuous, and who were thought of, therefore, as uncivil, and in this sense closer to blackness, who tended to perform as coon shouters.

White coon shouting had been linked with blackface, and indeed had been acceptable because of the use of blackface. As blackface declined in relevance so certain singers, constructed as marginally white, began using the techniques of expressive intensity without the pretext of appearing ‘black’. From this point of view, torch singing pioneered the use of these black vocal techniques in singing aimed at a white, middle-class audience by singers who, claiming whiteness, performed without any pretence of being black. As these techniques became accepted and generalized to mainstream white singers so the term ‘coon shouting’ became irrelevant. This acceptance was a long and gradual process. By the 1970s, terms such as ‘Middle of the Road’ and ‘Easy Listening’ were developed to describe music which does not use these techniques.

Blackface and Jewish Blackness

Jeffrey Melnick remarks that, ‘Jews were quite successful at selling themselves in blackface: Irving Howe argues that by 1910 or so, Jews had more or less taken over blackface entertainment.’⁴ Michael Rogin is more expansive: ‘In addition to [Al] Jolson, Eddie Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel, Fanny Brice, and Sophie Tucker all got their start in blackface.’⁵ Certainly, in the early years of the twentieth century, Jews took over and revived a form of popular entertainment that had been slowly dying out. Melnick tracks a brief history of Jolson’s career in blackface from the early years of the century, explaining that, ‘By the time Jolson starred in The Jazz Singer, in 1927, he was America’s biggest vaudeville star, and blackface was central to his act.’⁶ The first question here, then, was why white entertainers were decreasingly blacking up. One element in a structural answer is that, in short, they no longer needed to. Eric Goldstein remarks succinctly,

From the earliest days of the republic, the notion of an essential divide between blacks and whites had served as a master narrative, offering white Americans a clear means by which they could fortify their own self-image and imagine themselves as racially superior.⁷

With the influx of mostly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and mostly Italian immigrants from the Mediterranean countries, the black—white divide was inflected by crucial concerns among the dominant race as to who was racially white. The structural importance of blackface for those preoccupied with defining who could be classified as white decreased. This meant that blackface was now available for migrants who were considered to have racial affinities with blacks.

There are other important ways of thinking about why blackface became such an important aspect of Jewish theatrical performance. Rogin quotes Howe: ‘Black became a mask for Jewish expressiveness, with one woe speaking through the voice of another.’⁸ This argument emphasizes the perceived affinities between blacks and Jews. Rogin himself argues that, ‘Minstrelsy claimed to speak for both races through the blacking up of one.’⁹ Rogin understands the Jewish use of blackface as a tactic of Americanization through the interpellation of Jews into what ‘was the first and most popular form of mass culture in the United States’, which ‘provided the new country with a distinctive national identity’.¹⁰ As Rogin writes elsewhere, ‘Blackface is the instrument that transfers identities from immigrant Jew to American.’¹¹

Melnick recasts Rogin’s argument, placing it in a broader historical context. Melnick explains that, by the 1920s,

Jews’ anxiety about being conflated with African Americans had eased considerably. In large part this was a result of their conquest of urban mass entertainment, which converted a postulated Jewish closeness to African Americans into a vehicle which carried them closer to a form of white ethnicity.¹²

At the heart of Melnick’s argument is the claim that blackface was an important factor in the whitening of Jews, in the reconstruction of the Jews as having a form of whiteness.

From around the 1870s, Americans evinced a new preoccupation with the problem of how racially to classify Jews. Noting this, Goldstein argues that the primary reason had to do with the way white Americans associated Jews with the forces and processes of modernization.¹³ He also remarks on the changing size of the Jewish population in the United States, which increased ‘from about 200,000 to over one million during the last three decades of the nineteenth century’.¹⁴ To this we can add that, while much of the earlier migration had consisted of acculturated and modernized German Jews, the later migration was mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews from the cities and shtetls of the Pale. These Jews neither appeared nor sounded European. Goldstein argues that,

One means of defusing the troubling ambivalence of the Jewish racial image was to liken Jews to African Ameri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Moanin’ Low’: Jews, Whiteness and Torch Singing
• 2 Jews dreaming of acceptance: From the Brill Building to Suburbia with Love
• 3 ‘Stay with Me’: Torch Songs and the Assertion of Jewish Difference in the 1960s and 1970s
• 4 Jews and Blues: The Jewish Involvement in the 1960s Blues Revival
• 5 The Beastie Boys: Jews in Whiteface
• 6 A Jew Singing Like a Black Woman in Australia: Race, Renée Geyer and Marcia Hines
• 7 Not Quite English: Helen Shapiro’s Jewishness and English Exclusivity
• 8 Visibly Jewish: Amy Winehouse in Multicultural Britain
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index