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Home , Doc Pomus, Israel Zangwill, Laura Nyro, Leo Mintz, Mort Shuman, Phil Chess

How America Invented (And What That Teaches Us Today) Written for and Presented on Underground Media Productions January 14th, 2021

- Speaker: Larry Kuperman

Why Am I Here Tonight? (Or Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?)

Before I begin my presentation, I would like to thank Acacia Dietz for hosting this and to salute Jeff Schoep for making this possible. Jeff and I are so different and yet I will always value his friendship and empathy and view him as a living symbol of redemption, proof that America is about second chances.

Okay, now onto the immediate reason that I am speaking tonight. On January 6th, 2021 we all watched our American Capitol be defaced. With all the terrible events of that day, the most striking images were of my fellow Americans wearing on their shirts “Camp Auschwitz” and “6 Million Weren’t Enough.” I was so angry, so enraged that I wanted to….teach them that their hatred was misplaced and based in part on ignorance of our shared history.

Yes, I know that they hate me, hate my family, hate my children. They view all things made by people like me as tainted, unclean, and defiling the purity that they long for. I wonder if they knew that included in the things made by “mud people” like me is that most American form of music, Rock and Roll. This is the story of how that came about.

Before I tell you that story, I’d like to ask that you think about, visualize, a map of the world. Look at how small the Middle East is. Now zoom in even closer and look at Israel. See that little dot that is Jerusalem? That is place that the Arabs call Al-Quds, the Holy One. Ask yourself by what coincidence this place, this tiny bit of land, brought forth Moses, Jesus, and Muhammed. And you’ll have to listen to the end to have that question answered.

Our American Story

The history of Black and in America goes back a lot further than people realize. In 1619, the San Juan Bautista1, a Portuguese ship, left Angola in Africa to cross the Middle Passage to the New World with 350 slaves on board. By the time the ship docked at Veracruz, Mexico on August 30th, only 147 remained alive and on board. Fifty had been taken by English pirates aboard the ship the White Lion and would be exchanged for food and supplies at the English colony of Point Comfort in Virginia.

1 1619 in America: 400 years ago, Africans arrived in Virginia (usatoday.com) A year after the arrival of the first Africans in America, the Pilgrims would arrive on board the Mayflower. Not to belabor the point but let’s remember who was here first.

The Pilgrims were among a number of groups who came to America seeking the freedom to worship as they saw fit. Among the other groups that would follow were Jews fleeing the Inquisition.

Europe was not a hospitable place for Jews. In fact, the word “ghetto” originally referred to a specific place to that section of Venice where Jews were segregated.2 But it was generally a place where Jews could survive.

Jews had lived peacefully in Spain and Portugal for hundreds of years. Beginning in 1492, under royal edicts, both Jews and Muslims were told that they must either convert to Christianity or leave. Even if they chose to stay, they were called Marranos and were under suspicion. Most Jews accepted conversion, sometime practicing Jewish rites in secret. Others fled. Holland, which was a Spanish colony, was one destination. Brazil, that was originally under Dutch authority, was another. Although it has since been renamed the Rua dos Judeus (Street of the Jews) in Recife, Brazil was the site of the Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue, built in 1636. South America was not to be the final destination.

Joachim Gans, born in Prague, Bohemia, was recruited by Sir Walter Raleigh as a mining expert. He had helped develop a new process for the smelting of copper. He arrived in America in 1585, settling in the Virginia territory. He didn’t stay long, returning to England in 1586. But he was the first.

2 Venetian Ghetto - Wikipedia In 1654, Jacob Barsimson, an agent of the Dutch Jewish community arrives at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, to make ready. Later that same year a group of 23 Jews from Recife in Brazil flee the Portuguese aboard the Sainte Catherine. Barsimson meets them. But they are not welcomed.

Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant called them “the deceitful race, the hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ…” and has them thrown in prison. But he has made a mistake. His employer, the Dutch West India Company, has Jewish investors who order him to “let my people go.” I am paraphrasing, but you get the idea. Jews have arrived in what would become the United States 120 years before the Declaration of Independence.

I have spoken about this before. Jews, in particular Haym Salomon, supported the American Revolution as this was our home.

Our Un-Civil War

Slavery spread throughout the Americas. The insidious practice was not confined to the British or to the colonies that would become the United States. The Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Danish, and the French all were involved. They established outposts on the African coast, bought enslaved people from local leaders, and transported them to Europe and the Western Hemisphere with little regard for human life. It is estimated that over 12 million Africans were taken from their homes, with 1.2 to 2.4 million dying during the passage and millions more dying in what were called “seasoning camps.”3

It would be great if I could say that Jews did not participate in the slave trade, but that wouldn’t be true. Also untrue is the myth that Jews dominated the trade. By

3 Atlantic slave trade - Wikipedia and large Jews were as guilty, no more and no less, as other people of European descent.

In the years after the Revolution, the American city with the largest Jewish population was Charleston, South Carolina. The charter of that fair city guaranteed freedom of expression to “Jews, heathens, and dissenters.“ Jews were accepted in a way that they had not been in Europe. And outside of the ghetto life, they began to mingle with their neighbors.

Some members of Congregation Beth Elohim began to notice that the services attended by their Christian neighbors were in English. And were shorter. And had organ music! They petitioned the congregation to adopt these traits. When they were rejected, they formed their own congregation, the Reform Society of Israelites and Reform Judaism was born.

Now bear in mind that South Carolina was in that part of the country where slavery was prevalent. We don’t have evidence of it, but it is logical that in some households the Passover Seder meal, the Jewish celebration of the flight from slavery in the land of Egypt, was served by African slaves. Again, there is a myth that Jews were particularly engaged in the slave trade. There are meticulous records of the sale and purchase of slaves and Jewish owners were in about the same proportion as non-Jewish.4

When the Civil War broke out Jews fought on both sides. About 12,000 Jews in all were engaged in the war, with three-fourths (about 9000) fighting for the Union. The remainder fought for the Confederacy. Ft. Myers, Florida, is named after Abraham Myers, the quartermaster general for the South5. Judah P. Benjamin served as first the Secretary of War and then the Secretary of State for the Confederacy. After the war he would flee the United States.6

While I have said that Jews were, by and large, accepted in America, that was not always the case. In 1862, Union Major-General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11 expelling all Jews from his district: Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. President Lincoln would countermand that order in 1863.

4 Project MUSE - Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (review) (jhu.edu) 5 QM General Abraham C Myers Story – The Virtual Museum of Southwest Florida Jewish History (jewishhistorysouthwestflorida.org) 6 Judah P. Benjamin - Wikipedia

What About the Music?

The point so far is to set the stage that Blacks and Jews were here in America from the very earliest days and that we had shed our blood to gain the freedoms that we enjoy today. But let’s get to the music.

In the city of New Orleans there is a park named after Louis Armstrong and in this park there is place called Congo Square. The French slave- owners in the days before the Civil War allowed the slaves to meet there, giving them freedom from their labors. They celebrated by playing their traditional music and doing their traditional dances. Soon Europeans began coming to the park to watch and listen.

A thing happened then. The slaves began to play African songs on the musical instruments of the Europeans and to mix the two styles of music. This gave rise to the New Orleans Second Line and to American . Early performers who helped popularize this style of music included Mahalia Jackson, Jelly Roll Morton and of course, Louis Armstrong.

Things were changing for as well. The first Jewish settlers came from Spain and Portugal, the Sephardim. They were soon joined by Western European Jews from Holland, France and Germany. But beginning in the 1880s waves of Eastern European Jews began arriving, driven out of their homes by the pogroms (riots) of the .

These Eastern European Jews, the Ashkenazi, had their own musical tradition, Klezmer. The easiest way to describe Klezmer is Jewish jazz. One of the primary instruments was the violin. (Hilly Kristal, the founder of the famous CBGB club, once said that you can’t run away from a pogrom carrying a piano.) Klezmer had always been the product of multiple cultural influences, including that of the Romani people, something that can clearly be heard in the dance music. In America, this traditional Jewish music mixed with American Jazz to form something new.

Israel Isidore Beilin had been born in Tyumen, Siberia. His family arrived at Ellis Island in in 1893 when he was 5 years old. They soon found that they had traded one form of poverty for another. His family lived in a basement flat on Monroe Street before “moving up” to a tenement on Cherry Street. His father died when he was 13. As a young boy, he had a job delivering newspapers. He was once knocked into the harbor by a crane. When he was pulled out from the water, he was still clenching five pennies.

By 1907, Israel had changed his name to . He became a songwriter, selling his first song for 37 cents. In 1911 he would score big with his song Alexander’s Ragtime Band, a song that would be covered over and over again. Four different versions would make the Top Ten in 1911. In writing this song, Berlin had been influenced by the work of African-American songwriter Scott Joplin, and Berlin’s success helped revive interest in Joplin’s work and that of other Black artists. Ironically Irving Berlin, a Jew, would write some of the most memorable traditional American Christian music: Easter Parade, White Christmas, and God Bless America.

Once Irving Berlin had, so to speak, opened the door brothers George and Ira Gershwin (original name was Gershowitz) followed. In 1919 George Gershwin had a big hit with his song Swanee. In 1924 his song Rhapsody in Blue established him as a genius. If there is any question as to the influence of African-American history and culture on the music being composed by American Jews Gershwin’s play Porgy and Bess should settle that. The play was first performed by a group of classically trained African- American singers in Boston in 1935 before moving to Broadway. The casting was daring for its time and the play was a financial failure until its revival in 1976 by the Houston Grand Opera.

Jews were performing in vaudeville and burlesque, often under Americanized names and sometimes in Black Face, something that causes revulsion today. was among the most famous performers and his performance was captured in the Jazz Singer, the first movie with a synchronized soundtrack. I think that most modern American Jews shudder when they see this. But at the same time, there was a thing called Jewface, where performers, often Jewish themselves, would put on exaggerated noses and perform humor based on stereotypes. Neither of these are our proudest moments.

Sophie Tucker was a rebel. Doing a performance that called for blackface, she claimed her makeup kit got lost. She was allowed to go out without it. She then stunned the crowd by saying, "You all can see I'm a white girl. Well, I'll tell you something more: I'm not Southern. I'm a Jewish girl and I just learned this Southern accent doing a blackface act for two years. And now, Mr. Leader, please play my song.”

Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s Jewish men and women were working as songwriters, many of them in the located at 1619 Broadway in NYC. A partial list includes Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond, Marvin Hamlisch, Neil Sedaka, , Paul Simon, , , Leiber and Stoller, and “Doc” Pomus and .

Musical acts that also made the Brill Building their home included , (with Ben E. King), Lesley Gore, Liza Minnelli, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (), The Ronettes, The Shirelles, Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, Dionne Warwick.

Many of the Jewish songwriters wrote for Black musicians. Hound Dog, made famous by Elvis, was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton in 1952. Leiber and Stoller would also work with Ben E. King on the hit Stand by Me.

This musical partnership between Jews who had come from Europe’s ghettos and Black musicians, for whom the memory of slavery was less than 100 years old, gave rise to America’s music.

Leo Mintz owned a record store in , Ohio, that sold Rhythm and records recorded by Black artists or by white artists influenced by Black performers. The problem that he faced was that white audiences were reluctant to buy what they regarded as Negro music. He made a deal with a local radio DJ, , to help him sell records. Freed began playing “authentic R&B” on his radio show, but white audiences were resistant. So Freed rebranded the music as “Rock and Roll” a slang term that was a euphemism for sex. By 1952 Freed had renamed his show Moondog’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Party. In the 1956 film Rock, Rock, Rock, Freed says “rock and roll is a river of music which has absorbed many streams: , jazz, ragtime, cowboy songs, country songs, folk songs. All have contributed greatly to the big beat. “

Phil Chess was born Fiszel Czyż in what was then, is Belarus now. Along with his brother Leonard, sister Malka and mother and father, the family came to America in 1928, settling in . Fiszel became Phil. After serving in WWII, the brothers opened a club, the Macomba Lounge. Two years later, Leonard became a partner in Aristocrat Records and brought Phil with him. Originally Aristocrat recorded a wide range of music. In 1950, the company changed its name to and began specializing in R&B music, being one of the very few labels that recorded the music of Black performers – Howlin’ Wolf, , , “Sonny Boy Williamson”, , and .

In 1955, Muddy Waters sent a young Black musician to audition for Phil Chess. The performer was to play a Blues song entitled “Wee Wee Hours.” Phil was mildly interested in the song but explained that if they would cut a record, they would need something for the B-side. The performer also had a country song that he played when he was at mixed-race clubs called “Ida Red.” Phil was fascinated by a "hillbilly song sung by a black man. “ While he liked the song he told the performer that he would need to change the lyrics and the title of the song. “Well, Hell, let's name the damn thing .“ – Attributed to Phil Chess by Johnnie Johnson, the pianist for . "The kids wanted the big beat, cars, and young love," Chess recalled. "It was the trend and we jumped on it.”

The connections from the Fifties to more modern music are clear. Richard Wayne Penniman, aka Little Richard, influenced a whole generation of White performers including , Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, , and Eddie Cochran, who all recorded covers of his works. In 1972, he shocked a BBC interviewer by calling himself “a lil’ Jewish boy, black bottom, from Georgia.”7 Richard also helped influence the career of James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix, and the pair recorded the single "I Don't Know What You Got (But It's Got Me)" in

1965. Hendrix is one of the Black artists whose work was more popular with white audiences than with Black.

In 1966, was on tour in . Cream, featuring guitarist , was to perform. Hendrix asked if he could play a few songs between Cream’s sets. Recalling the meeting Clapton said, "He played just about every style you could think of, and not in a flashy way. I mean he did a few of his tricks, like playing with his teeth and behind his back, but it wasn't in an upstaging sense at all, and that was it ... He walked off, and my life was never the same again. "

In 1972, Andy "Adny" Shernoff who was attending The State University of New York at New Paltz and his friend Ross "The Boss" Friedman who was playing in the local band Total Crudd got together to form the early Punk band The Dictators. Their song The Next Big Thing included the lyrics: I knocked 'em dead in Dallas, And I didn't pay my dues, Yeah, I knocked 'em dead in Dallas, They didn't know we were Jews.

If you were in in the 1980s you were exposed to two local bands: Run-DMC (1984) became the first hip hop group to have a Gold Record and in 1986 three Jewish boys from performing as the released

7 Rock legend Little Richard was fascinated with Judaism | The Times of Israel Licensed to Ill. When the Beastie Boys started incorporating sampling into their sets, they would hire Rick Rubin as the DJ. Rubin was a Jewish kid from Lido Beach, NY. He had met Russell Simmons while they were both students at NYU. Rubin and Simmons would form Def Jam Recordings and would sign the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Geto Boys, and Run-DMC to their label and help promote Hip Hop.

Conclusion

There you have it. American music, like American culture and yes, even American religious practices, is an amalgamation of contributions from many people, including Blacks and Jews. You can draw a line connecting the dots from Congo Square and jazz, to America’s greatest show tunes, to Allen Freed and the Brill Building, to Chuck Berry and Maybellene, to Hendrix and modern rock, to Punk, to rap music. It is all part of America’s great Melting Pot. (The term Melting Pot, by the way, originates with a play of that name written by , a Jew.)

If the Camp Auschwitz crew insists on only listening to music written by the “pure” – I hope that they don’t get tired of Wagner.

Now the answer to the question about what is so special about the Middle East. It is in the MIDDLE! Ancient Israel or was on the trade route that connected the ancient empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The ports on the Mediterranean were visited by traders from Crete and Greece. The wisdom that gave rise to Western religions comes from exposure to the philosophies of Africa, Europe, and Asia. Face it, we are better when we create hybrids.