Jewish Singers-Songwriters in the 1960S and 1970S

CHAPTER 6 Singing from Difference: Jewish Singers-Songwriters in the 1960s and 1970s Jon Stratton During the period after World War II Jews were gradually integrated into “white” American society. To be accepted as white meant that Jews had to give up many distinctive features including, perhaps most obviously, the injunc- tion to marry within the Jewish community. That Jews struggled to retain many of their identifying characteristics meant that their whiteness was only ever provisional. Once Jews had been identified as a race; now they were reclas- sified as an ethnic group. However, the “new ethnic definition of Jewishness not only failed to satisfy the emotional needs of many Jews, but also fell short of the expectations of non-Jewish society that Jews would suppress all but religious expressions of group difference as they integrated.”1 Since the turn of the twentieth century Jews have contributed in much greater proportion than their numbers would suggest to American culture.2 Stephen J. Whitfield writes that the “creativity of American Jewry has . affected and altered [the national] culture.”3 This was certainly true of popular music where Whitfield writes that “Jews were dominant in the creative as well as the commercial side of Tin Pan Alley. Its songs would, for more than half a century, help unify a huge and disparate nation.”4 The singer-songwriters with whom I deal here arrived after the dominance of Tin Pan Alley, but while many of their concerns emerged out of American Jewish life their popularity signaled that they also spoke to mainstream, white American culture. In the United States, the late 1960s and 1970s were the era of the singer- songwriter. Indeed, in his book on this genre, Dave Thompson discusses “the 1 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 206. 2 For a sophisticated collection of essays on this subject, see Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, eds., Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Differences (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3 Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1999), 30. 4 Whitfield, xiii. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004�04775_008 Singing from Difference 97 singer-songwriter explosion of 1970–71.”5 Artists as diverse as Tim Hardin, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and James Taylor reached a peak of popularity. Among them were a disproportionate number of Jewish artists, mostly men but including a number of women, too. In this chapter I shall be concentrating on Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Randy Newman, and Paul Simon. Phil Ochs could also be mentioned, as could Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Leonard Cohen, who was born and raised in Canada, is often included in this list. I shall write about him, but primarily as a counter-example. For reasons I shall discuss, Cohen’s concerns have not been, in the main, the same as those of the others I have identified. These Jewish singer-songwriters were characterized by a variety of socially-oriented preoccupations which were at variance with the self-absorbed, individualistic interests of the majority of their peers. With the important exception of Janis Ian, Jewish female singer-songwriters such as Carole King and Carly Simon expressed interests mostly in line with those of gentile singer-songwriters. I am not the first person to have noted the significance of these Jewish artists. Michael Billig discusses this group primarily as bringing intellectual quali- ties to popular music. Noting the importance of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” he writes that “Jews were to make a significant contribution to this intellectual development of rock.”6 Billig focuses on Dylan, Simon, Cohen, and Reed. For Billig the “new songwriters demonstrated that nothing was beyond the range of the popular song: politics, social comment, domestic detail, and general complaint could all take their place alongside the more traditional themes of love, sex, and dancing.”7 Billig goes on to make another important point to which we will return: “Yet, with some exceptions, there was a huge gap. The Jewish singing auteurs avoided Jewish themes, at least directly.”8 Moreover, as we shall see, these Jews were of a generation that was conflicted about its Jewishness in an American context where Jews had been reassigned as white, but ambiguously so (see, for example, Brodkin, and Goldstein). These Jewish artists kept their Jewishness hidden. Billig contrasts this with Jewish novelists such as Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, and Saul Bellow, who directly confronted themes about the Jewish experience in the United States. A reason for this divergence is not hard to find. The novelists were not writing popular fiction. Their work was essentially high culture, directed at an educated, liberal read- ership, many of whom would have been members of the Jewish intelligentsia. 5 Dave Thompson, Hearts of Darkness: James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, and the Unlikely Rise of the Singer-Songwriter (Montclair, NJ: Backbeat Books, 2012), 2. 6 Michael Billig Rock ‘n’ Roll Jews (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2000), 115. 7 Billig, 117. 8 Billig, 117..

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