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On this first night of Chanukah, Marco Werman talks with Roger Bennett, co-author of And You Shall Know Us By the Trail of Our Vinyl about his work saving decades of American Jewish music from obscurity.
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head
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Hava Nagila
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Fiddler on the Roof
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Kol Nidre
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. At sundown tonight Hanukkah begins which means we can play great Hanukkah music like … . No don’t worry we’re not going to hear the dreidel song. Let’s listen instead to some music that often gets overlooked.
[MUSIC]
That would be none other than Motown greats The Temptations doing their version of the Fiddler on the Roof overture. So Roger Bennett you tell us how come no one ever talks about The Temptations [INDISCERNIBLE] music?
ROGER BENNETT: I think that’s a lot down to the triumph of Barry, Barbara, and Neil that would be Manalo, Streisand, and of course Neil Diamond, the Holy Trinity of Jewish musicians who kind of define what Jewish music is for a generation like myself who grew up after a time when Jews had mostly left the city, entered the suburbs, and moved very quickly from tradition to modernity. And all their careers, all the Jewish music, and the musicians on whose shoulders they were kind of standing all of those guys were written out of history. And our job, the Idelsohn Society is to reclaim them and reinsert them into the present.
WERMAN: Right and Roger you and fellow Jewish music aficionado Josh Kun authored this informative and very entertaining book titled, “And You Shall Know us by The Trail of Our Vinyl.” Explain the title and what you and Josh Kun are doing with this music. I mean it’s turned into a major project; a non-profit you run called the Idelsohn Society.
BENNETT: Absolutely. It’s also David Kutz Nelson, a record label executive from San Francisco and Courtney Holt, the president of MySpace Music. I mean the four of us just found these albums, these Latin Jewish combos from the 1950s like Irving Fields who did Bagels and Bongos, Juan Kelly and his Latin [INDISCERNIBLE] who did Mazel Tov Mis Amigos. And this music blew us away. We found this crazy world of Jews making Latin music; non-Jews making Jewish music and we were just amazed that we’d never inherited any of this history. And we set about over the past eight trying to save as much of this vinyl as possible getting it sent to us by our website, the Idelsohn Society dot com but also going down to Boca which is where Jewish vinyl goes to die.
WERMAN: Boca Raton, Florida.
BENNETT: Absolutely. And I know that place better than I ever dreamt. And our goal was to save the vinyl. We started to reissue it. And now we’ve moved into getting the performers back on stage, 80 and 90 year old performers, and if any of the original performers from the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s are listening to you today we’d love to hear from you. We’ve raised funding to record your stories, preserve them, because the history is literally being edited out of the present.
WERMAN: Well let’s hear another example. We’re about to hear the Barry Sisters. Give us a quick line on who they are and then we’ll hear their Yiddish version of … . Well our listeners will figure it out pretty quickly. Who are they?
BENNETT: I mean the Barry Sisters were one of many sister-sister combos that were popular in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Their great skill was to take popular music favorites of the present and translate them through to Jewish linguistics of the ‘40s and ‘50s Yiddish. The track you’re about to hear is a masterpiece when you drop a little bit and it can blow the audiences mind.
[MUSIC]
WERMAN: The Barry sisters there and Roger Bennett I mean they were Jewish but they’re covering like the ultimate [INDISCERNIBLE] AM radio tune, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. Did Jews take this seriously when it came out or did they feel like this was cute and campy but not really Jewish?
BENNETT: I mean I think the cute and campy is really just a projection back from the present onto the past. Back in the day the Jewish music purchasing audience was veracious. And a testament to that is the incredible number of non-Jews who recorded Jewish music. Everybody from Perry Como, Connie Frances, and The Temptations and of course Johnny Mathis recorded Jewish albums teaching themselves Hebrew, Aramaic, and often Yiddish in the process to do so. This stuff was treated very, very seriously. What they are are kind of icons of identity and in collecting them really what we’re trying to do is ask ourselves who we are, what we’re inheriting, what we know about it, and what it really means to us.
WERMAN: Right and on that tip I mean you devote a chapter in your book to the Latin tinge and how it crossed over into Jewish music and vice versa. Here’s Latino musician Joe Kihano with a very danceable version of [INDISCERNIBLE].
[MUSIC]
WERMAN: Roger Bennett what was the Latino reaction at the Palladium Ballroom for example in New York when the DJ dropped that tune, [INDISCERNIBLE]?
BENNETT: That whole album is exquisite and it was one of many that have been lost to history. And the whole Latin Jewish story raises questions about community, the mixing and matching, the borrowing of traditions that did go on and how both communities tell that story or don’t tell that story. And I think the more we know about it the more we’re blown away by symbiosis culturally between the two communities in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
WERMAN: Well Roger let’s go out with this quite serious and beautiful version of the [PH] Col Nidre the inaugural prayer of Yum Kippur. This is the golden voice of Johnny Mathis. A quick line on this. You mentioned him earlier.
BENNETT: Johnny Mathis released an album of songs of faith in the late ‘50s of mostly Christian hymns. But he also recorded three Jewish songs. I asked him why, how did this come to be? And he said I spent time in the studio recording songs of faith and after a while I was looking around and I realized the whole band was Jewish and it was the band that persuaded him to transliterate the Aramaic into kind of the English pronunciation and in a couple of takes nailed it. And when we go down to Florida and we play the music we found for the 80 and 90 year olds we speak to on a regular basis when we play this song by the end of it they are normally just weeping with joy.
WERMAN: Alright we’ll go out with Johnny Mathis and [PH] Col Nidre. It’s a wonderful book that’s uncovered some extraordinary songs. Roger Bennett is co-author of “You Shall Know us by the Trail of our Vinyl” and the co-founder of the Idelsohn Society. Very good to speak with you Roger.
BENNETT: Thank you Marco.
[MUSIC]
WERMAN: Johnny Mathis there singing Col Nidre. Not a song for tonight. Still we wish you all a Happy Hanukkah. By the way you can see some very entertaining album covers from Roger’s book at The World dot org. our secular theme song was composed by Eric Goldberg from the Nan and Bill Harris Studios at WGBH in Boston. I’m Marco Werman. Thank you for joining us.
[MUSIC]
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