The year was 1937, five years after "Bei Mir Bistu Sheyn" ("To Me You Are Beautiful"), from the Yiddish operetta I Would if I Could, made a hit with Jewish audiences in America. Composer Sholom Secunda was certain the song had crossover potential and was trying to convince Hollywood producers it could be a popular hit.
But Hollywood wasn't buying; the song was too Jewish. So Secunda decided to sell publication rights to J. & J. Kammen Music Company for the grand sum of $30—and split the proceeds with his lyricist, Jacob Jacobs.
As things turned out, Secunda's instincts were correct, but he settled too soon. A couple of years before he sold the copyright, two other Jewish musicians, Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, were in the audience at Harlem's Apollo Theater one night when Johnny & George, a pair of African American performers, brought down the house singing "Bei Mir"—in Yiddish.
Realizing the song had huge market potential, Cahn bought the sheet busic and tried to interest Tommy Dorsey in performing it for a mainstream audience, to no avail. But in 1937, just months after Secunda sold his rights to the music, Cahn acquired them and created a swing version with English lyrics for a fledgling trio who were trying to break into show business—the Andrews Sisters. Their Decca recording of "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön (Means That You're Grand)" raced to the top of the charts. Shortly after its release in December 1937, it became the best-selling record of all time.
"The story of 'Bei Mir' provides us with a window into the process of Jewish American acculturation," says Joshua Jacobson, Acting Dean of the School of Jewish Music. "It first appears as an artifact meaningful only to the ‘insider' population for whom it was created. Then it completely sheds its Jewish identity—the Yiddish lyrics, the scales of synagogue music—in order to be accepted by the American public at large."
Jewish musicians would come to dominate the new field of popular music. From "King of Swing" Benny Goodman, whose interracial big band and collaboration with black arranger Fletcher Henderson made jazz history, to George and Ira Gershwin and their classic jazz opera, Porgy and Bess, Jewish composers, lyricists, performers and publishers could be found on every page of the Hit Parade.
And that was only the beginning. For nearly a century, Jews have continued to create new and exciting forms of popular music, here in the U.S. and around the world. Jacobson, who is also founding director of the Zamir Chorale of Boston, Hebrew College artists-in-residence, is in the midst of developing a Jewish jazz concert, JaZZamir, for next spring that will run the gamut from "Bei Mir" to exciting contemporary choral arrangements by the Israeli jazz choir Coral.
"The interplay between Jewish and African American musicians was a crucial part of the mix in early jazz," says Jacobson. "And that continues today. You can hear the new mix in the performances of The Hip Hop Hoodios, Matisyahu, Paul Shapiro, Greg Wall and others. But now these Jewish artists are using the post-modern mix as a means of expressing new forms of Jewish identity. They have transformed their parents' assimilation into their own dissimilation."
—Evelyn Herwitz
Evelyn Herwitz is Director of Marketing and Communications at Hebrew College.