You’ve read about it, Monday was supposedly the saddest day in the year, or so ‘scientists’ claim. Blue Monday. Of course that’s bullshit, as this Guardian blogpost heartily shows. Still, is it a coincidence that Monday also saw the arrival of the Berlin season of snow and ice? As someone with a decidedly ungenetic equatorial disposition, I’m having a hard time, needless to say, so I’m resorting to musical therapy to keep my morale up.
But what to play? New Order’d be good, if awfully literal, perhaps the steamrolling original, or this delightfully goth Gregorian version, or maybe the below French-language version by The Times, an English band signed to Creation Records that also recorded Japanese, Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese versions (all of which now very happily in my possession).
That and Judy Garland, of course. Oh, Judy… From her days as one of the Gumm sisters onwards, her relentless cheer and optimism (even and especially in the face of her many personal trials and tribulations) has proved utterly infectious. Like Rufus Wainwright, I’m very partial to her “Get Happy”, its imperative a memento mori to “get ready for the Judgment Day”. Quite the booster.
I’ve almost two gigabytes of Judy on my laptop and yet I always come back to a very obscure recording from a radio show called ”Young America Wants to Help”, broadcast on 27 April, 1941. With contributions from Garland, Oscar Hammerstein, New York Mayor La Guardia, and even the Royal Family, the broadcast was meant to boost morale both in the US and UK during what were to be the final weeks of the Blitz. It never fails to tug at ALL my heartstrings, even if it’s just for the first minute and a half. After that things turn far too chipper (“We’ll turn the Blitz on Fritz!”, etc.).
These wartime Judy recordings, only released a few years ago, prove a strange time machine. What about a satirical twist on “We’re Off To See The Wizard” from The Wizard of Oz redubbed “We’re Off To See Herr Hitler”? Or the almost obligatory “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön”?
I’d wondered about the lyrics to that song before (and I’m not the first one, it’s been misheard as “My Beer, Mr. Shane” and my personal favorite, “My Mere Bits of Shame”), but hearing Judy’s version was honestly the first time I realized that song was Yiddish. Sure, I’d wondered about the strange popularity of a German-sounding track during the height of WWII, but I just figured it was one of those off Axis/Allied hits like the originally German “Lili Marlene”, which Goebbels famously tried to ban when he learned of its success abroad, only to be swamped in letters from his own soldiers, at which point it was reinstated as the official radio sign-off every night at 9:55 PM.
The story of “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” (or, בײַ מיר ביסטו שיין, which translates as ‘To Me You’re Beautiful’) is a little stranger. Originally written and composed for a Yiddish operetta in 1932, the track suddenly found itself a radio (and sheet music!) hit after the then-unknown Andrews Sisters recorded it in 1937.
This is what supposedly happened: Lyricist Sammy Cahn first heard it at the Apollo or the Cotton Club in Harlem, of all places, where it was sung and performed in Yiddish by African American performers Johnny and George, who’d in turn learned it when they were working up at a resort in the Catskills. Cahn bought the rights for $30, wrote some new lyrics, and the original songwriters, Jacob Jacobs and Sholom Secunda, wouldn’t see another penny off their composition until 1961. The song became enormous, Ella Fitzgerald recorded it, and Judy did too; of Johnny and George no trace remains.
As with “Marleen/Marlene”, the song’s earworminess won out over geopolitical concerns. At least at first. In Russia, it appeared as “Baron von der Pshik”, which Google Translate suggests is about a chic German baron who in his quest for the Russian ‘bacon’ up in Stalingrad turns out to have underestimated the pointiness of Russian bayonets. There’s also a less politically charged version exotically called “In the Cape Town Port”, which appeared in Soviet Russia long after the war. As for the Germans, in January 1938, the Camden Courier-Post reported, “it’s wowing Manhattan, Queens and Richmond as well. Up in Yorkville [an Upper East Side neighborhood then with a high concentration of German immigrants], the Nazi bierstuben patrons yodel it religiously, under the impression that it’s a Goebbels-approved German chanty”.
So it was it was in Nazi Germany too. At first assumed to be in some Bavarian dialect, the song was quickly banned from German radio when the song’s heritage become known. After all, Jewish compositions were not allowed to be played on the radio. That meant Mahler and Schoenberg, as well as Gershwin and Irving Berlin.
What is less known is that, at the same time, the Nazis were broadcasting these very same songs in their English-language broadcasts aimed at undermining morale among the Allied forces. Just as ‘Axis Sally’’s “Home Sweet Home Hour” aimed to make Allied soldiers feel homesick (for instance by insinuating their girlfriends back home were probably sleeping around with bolshevik boychicks), so were the daily broadcasts of “Charlie and His Orchestra” meant to break down the resolve of the English-speaking world through its own hit songs, now supercharged with anti-Semitic and anti-Communist fearmongering. You can hear a great many of them in a series of posts at WFMU; each is more horrifying and messed up than the next.
Well, consider my morale tanked. Time to take my vitamins and watch the Jackson Sisters (including an adorable Janet) do a very sweet version instead, or one by Hong Kong girlgroup the Reynettes. Wait! Fiona Apple, or no, let’s watch Cora Green, who sang it at the very end of the delightfully wonky 1938 ‘race’ film Swing!. With any luck I can make this song last until spring makes it back to Berlin again.