Poet and critic David Lehman will appear at Buffalo Street Books Saturday, August 14th to read from his work documenting the Jewish origin of the great American songbook, "A Fine Romance." Photo by Chris Felver
ODDS ARE THAT IF YOU ARE LISTENING to something from the great American songbook, those love songs, jazz standards and pieces from musicals and movie soundtracks that dominated popular music from the 1920s until the early 60s, what you’re listening to was written by a Jew. Even “White Christmas” by many accounts the most popular American song ever written was written by Irving Berlin, a Russian Jew who emigrated to New York City’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century and who grew to become the nation’s most famous composers and lyricists.
In “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs,” the acclaimed poet, editor and cultural critic argues that these timeless numbers are not only written by Jewish musicians but are in fact itself Jewish. Lehman, who has edited the “Best American Poetry” Anthology and ran a reading series at New York’s KGB Bar turns to the personal and the universal to provide a well-researched account of some of the major figures in this movement. The author will appear at Buffalo Street Books Saturday, August 14 at 3:00pm to read and discuss “A Fine Romance.”
The work is part of Random House’s ongoing Jewish Encounters series, and for this installment Lehman melds dreamy personal reflections with impressive archival excavation for a thorough look at the popular early-20th-century songwriters and what made their work quintessentially Jewish. Delving into the iconic hits of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Larry Hart, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, among selective others, Lehman ponders how these Ashkenazi Jews, mostly raised speaking Yiddish in New York as cantors’ sons, melded their particular wit, melancholy and sophistication with the rhythmic richness of African-American music — a blending of blues and jazz.
In their many beloved seminal hits — George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” — these sons (Dorothy Fields being the female lyricist exception) of refugees from anti-Semitic rumblings in Europe were conducting a passionate romance with America, Lehman maintains. The author himself grew up in the Inwood section of New York City, under the warm spell of these songs; by the time he graduated from Stuyvesant High School and attended Columbia, where many of these songwriters had met, rock and roll was supplanting that old-time magic. Digressive, nostalgic and deeply moving, Lehman achieves a fine, lasting tribute to the American songbook.
Lehman traces his “uncles” Jerome Kern and Harold (Chaim) Arlen through the streets of Tin Pan Alley onto Broadway and Hollywood. Lesser known than Berlin or Gershwin, these figures are profiled with loving and tender care.
As Lehman traces the roots of Jewish songwriters, he also argues that popular American music was itself Jewish. With a minor key, altered chords and a sound that recall Klezmer music and that of the cantor, Lehman identifies a “plaintive undertow,” a wit and irony, as well as a loving longing that embraced universal ideals. “Even happy songs sound a little mournful,” Lehman writes.
But by the time Lehman came of age in college, the American songbook was being replaced by Elvis Presley and rock and roll. “The new music devalued cleverness and irony, not to mention the clarinet and the trombone” Lehman writes, referring to protest songs like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
“I decided I had better talk to these people, to Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne and the rest while there was still time. That’s when I started this project. I took notes, made tapes, listened to records, read books… I will write up my love of American popular song and its Jewish creators and I will write it straight, leaving myself out of it…After all, the songs rank with Hollywood studio movies as the signal American cultural achievement of the last century, ahead of Abstract Expressionism, jazz, an modern poetry if only because the work of art with a wide and vital audience may be deemed to superior to the work of art for the ‘fit audience but few.’”
On this last point Lehman conceives his account is not without controversy. Where the author finds harmony between the Jewish and African-American experience, some might find exploitation. And some may find many of the work of the American songbook as sentimental at best, sappy at worst. Not Lehman: he finds more wit and irony than sentiment, and a close listen uncovers a truth to his position.
Lehman is at his best when he intermixes his personal history with his meticulous history, and how could he not? Popular music is absorbed not when it is appreciated, but when it is loved. And Lehman exhibits a great love for the material in “A Fine Romance.”
David Lehman’s “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs” is available at Buffalo Street Books.