composer had produced work of such commanding merit that musical
sentiment demanded its public rendition. Jewish manager after Jewish
manager was approached, but the combination was unbreakable. Finally,
one New Yorker talked out and said something about “Jewish combine,”
which had its effect. A Jewish manager protested that he would be glad
to give the work to the public. Rehearsals were held and the night of
presentation arrived. The first number was a solo and a Jew appeared to
sing it. He could not pronounce English words. He sang through his nose.
He was most Yiddish in appearance, the long nose, with narrow, sloping
forehead, curly hair. The second number was a duet, and behold two Jews
appeared, whose pronunciations differed between themselves. The
performance was a most hilarious tragedy. The purpose was to kill a
non-Jewish product by a poor Jewish rendition. But—the Jewish manager
overdid it. It needed just that to bring non-Jewish musical
consciousness to the surface and to explode the advertised and
money-bought notion that the Jew has predominant artistic genius. Say
that he predominates in music—yes; he has paid for and organized that
predominance; do not, however, say anything about his predominance in
musical genius or art.
Non-Jewish music has been stigmatized as “high brow.” It is purveyable
only in expensively good society. The people, the masses, are fed from
day to day on the moron suggestiveness that flows in a hurtful flood out
of Tin Pan Alley.
Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the region in Twenty-eighth street,
between Broadway and Sixth avenue, where the first Yiddish song
manufacturers began business. Flocks of young girls who thought they
could sing, and others who thought they could write song poems, came to
the neighborhood allured by dishonest advertisements that promised more
than the budding Yiddish exploiters were able to fulfill. Needless to
say, scandal became rampant, as it always does where so-called “Gentile”
girls are reduced to the necessity of seeking favors from the eastern
type of Jew. It was the constant shouting of voices, the hilarity of
“parties,” the banging of pianos and the blatting of trombones that gave
the district the name of Tin Pan Alley.
The first attempt to popularize and commercialize the so-called
“popular” type of music was made by Julius Witmark, who had been a
ballad singer on the minstrel stage. He ceased performing to become a
publisher, and was soon followed by East Side Jews, many of whom have
become wealthy through their success in pandering to a public taste
which they first debased.
Irving Berlin, whose real name is Ignatz or Isadore Baline, is one of
the most successful of these Jewish song controllers. He was born in
Russia and early became a singer and entertainer. With the rise of
“ragtime,” which was the predecessor of “jazz,” he found a new field for
his nimble talents, and his first big success was “Alexander’s ragtime
Band”—a popular piece which by comparison with what has followed it, is
a blushing, modest thing.
It was worth noting, in view of the organized eagerness of the Jew to
make an alliance with the Negro, that it was Jewish “jazz” that rode in
upon the wave of Negro “ragtime” popularity, and eventually displaced
the “ragtime.”
Berlin has steadily gone the road from mere interestingness to unashamed
erotic suggestion. He is the “headliner” in homes as well as in the
not-too-particular music halls, but his stuff without its music
sometimes savors of vile suggestion.
The motif of this business can be clearly seen in the “Berlin Big Hits.”
There are the so-called “vamp” songs, such as “Harem Life,” and “You
Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea.”
Among the “successes” is the song entitled, “I Like It.” It is a “vamp”
song which has been sung everywhere, even by myriads of children who
could not appreciate the full suggestion of the words, but were
hypnotized by the atmosphere which the words created when sung; and by
older folks who would not under any circumstances _speak_ the words of
the song, but who are victims of the modern delusion that a little
flashy music covers a multitude of sins. “I Like It” deals with a girl,
“Mary Green, seventeen,” whose mother reproves her for flirting with the
boys. (In the writing of this paragraph it was debated whether THE
DEARBORN INDEPENDENT should print what Mary replies to her mother. It
was argued that printing the words might give a salutary shock to
skeptical readers. It was also argued that the pages of this paper never
yet had been defiled by obscenity. Mary’s words, sung broadcast through
the country, are therefore not given here.)
Readers should reserve comment until they search the piles of moron
music rubbish in their own parlors. Readers have listened to much worse
stuff than Mary’s words, but covered by Yiddish “jazz.” It takes cold
type to show what a song really is. A good test for a song is to try to
read it aloud. Few normal people can.
“O-Hi-O,” as sung by Yiddish comedians, has a stench of its own. It may
be commented on more extensively later as an example of the Yiddish
practice of having three grades of the same song, to suit different
degrees of degenerate appetites.
Such songs are not the worst, by any means. Jewish purveyors to
degenerate appetites have a peculiarly devilish system of presenting the
same song in two or three grades. There will be the song as it is sold
at the music store to addle-pated young men and women who fill their
leisure with hearing or humming this syncopated senility—young men and
women who pitiably imagine they are keeping up with the times. The songs
thus sold and sung are rotten enough. But there is the same song, Class
2. The theme and the melody are the same, but it goes “a little
further.” There is a line or two in each stanza which dips below even
the low standard which Jewish “jazz” has permitted in some of our
parlors. And then there is Class 3—same theme, same melody—but “going
the limit.”
Young men about town usually know Class 2 and Class 3. The instance has
been known that young women have become acquainted with these lower
grades also. Forgetfulness by young men while singing at the piano
evenings has given hints of the filthier version. And even where version
1 has been strictly adhered to, the mutual knowledge, politely
concealed, has created an atmosphere far from wholesome.
The diabolical cunning with which an unclean atmosphere is created and
sustained through all classes of society and by the same influence, will
not be overlooked by any observer. There is something Satanic about it,
something calculated with demonic shrewdness. And the stream flows on
and on, growing worse and worse, to the degradation of the non-Jewish
public and the increase of Jewish fortunes.
If THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT were to print on this page the bare words of
the popular songs that are to be found in the parlors of the most
respectable section of every city, the reader’s sense of decency would
cry out against it. The same words when drawn out by numerous hyphens
and covered up with nervous music, insinuate their way into the hummed
tones of age and into the lilts of innocent childhood. Between the
movies and the popular songs the Jewish groups dictate the intellectual
life of the masses.
Among the latest Jewish “song hits” may be included these titles: “I’ll
Say She Does”; “You Cannot Shake That Shimmy Here”; “Sugar Baby”; “In
Room 202”; “Can You Tame Wild Wimmen?” and an almost endless list of the
same nature, some of which titles are too suggestive for print. Yet they
have free course everywhere—as everything Jewish does, in this country.
Ministers, educators, reformers, parents, citizens who are amazed at the
growth of looseness among the people, rail at the evil results. They see
the evil product and they attack the product. They rail at the young
people who go in for all this eroticism and suggestiveness.
But all this has a source! Why not attack the source? When a population
is bathed in sights, sounds and ideas of a certain character, drenched
in them and drowned in them, by systematic, deliberate, organized
intent, the point of attack should be the cause, not the effect. Yet,
that is precisely where the point of attack has not been made,
presumably because of lack of knowledge.
It is of little use blaming the people. The people are what they are
made. Give the liquor business full sway and you have a population that
drinks and carouses. After preaching abstinence to the victims for a
century, the country turned its attention to the victimizers and the
abuse was greatly curtailed. The traffic is still illicitly carried on,
but even so, the best way to abolish the illicit traffic is to identify
the groups that carry it on.
The entire population of the United States could be turned into narcotic
addicts if the same freedom was given the illicit narcotic ring as is
now given the Yiddish popular song manufacturers. But in such a
condition it would be stupid to attack the addicts; common sense would
urge the exposure of the panderers.
A dreadful narcotizing of moral modesty and the application of powerful
aphrodisiacs have been involved in the present craze for popular songs—a
stimulated craze. The victims are everywhere. But ministers, educators,
reformers, parents, and public-spirited citizens are beginning to see
the futility of scolding the young people thus diseased. Common sense
dictates a cleaning out of the source of disease. The source is in the
Yiddish group of song manufacturers who control the whole output and who
are responsible for the whole matter from poetry to profits.
Next to the moral indictment against the so-called “popular” song is the
indictment that _it is not popular_. Everybody hears it, perhaps the
majority sing it; it makes its way from coast to coast; it is flung into
the people’s minds at every movie and from every stage; it is advertised
in flaring posters; phonograph records shriek it forth day and night,
dance orchestras seem enamored of it, player pianos roll it out by the
yard. And by sheer dint of repetition and suggestion the song catches
on—as a burr thistle catches on; until it is displaced by another. There
is no spontaneous popularity.
It is a mere mechanical drumming on the minds of the public. There is
often not a single atom of sentiment or spiritual appeal in the whole
loudly trumpeted “success”; men and women, boys and girls have simply
taken to humming words and tunes which they cannot escape, night or day.
The deadly anxiety of “keeping up with the times” drives the army of
piano-owners to the music stores to see what is “going” now, and of
course it is the Yiddish moron music that is going, and so another home
and eventually another neighborhood is inoculated.
But there is no _popularity_. Take any moron music addict you know and
ask him what was the “popular” song three weeks ago, and he will not be
able to tell. These songs are so lacking in all that the term “popular”
means as regards their acceptableness, that they die overnight,
unregretted. Directly the Yiddish manufacturers have another “hit” to
make (it is always the public that is “hit”) a new song is crammed down
the public gullet, and because it is the “latest,” and because the
Yiddish advertisements say that it is a “hit,” and because the hired
“pluggers” say that everybody is singing it, that song too becomes
“popular” for its brief period, and so on through the year. It is the
old game of “changing the styles” to speed up business and make the
people buy. Nothing lasts in the Yiddish game—styles of clothing, movies
nor songs; it is always something new, to stimulate the flow of money
from the popular pocket into the moron music makers’ coffers.
There hasn’t been a real “popular” song of Yiddish origin since the
Jewish whistlers and back-alley songsters of New York’s East Side
undertook to handle musical America—not one, unless we except in genuine
gratitude George Cohan’s “Over There”, a song which came out of a period
of strain and went straight to the people’s heart.
Two facts about the “popular song” are known to all: first, that for the
most part it is indecent and the most active agent of moral miasma in
the country, or if not the most active, then neck and neck with the
“movies”; second, that the “popular song” industry is an exclusively
Jewish industry. But the inside story of the operation of this control
of the people’s music presents other facts which the people ought to
know, and these additional facts will appear in another article.
——
Issue of August 6, 1921.
XLVIII.
How the Jewish Song Trust Makes You Sing
Jews did not create the popular song; they debased it. The time of the
entry of Jews into control of the popular song is the exact time when
the morality of popular songs began to decline. It is not a pleasant
statement to make, but it is a fact. It would seem to be a fact of which
American Jews ought to take solemn cognizance, not to anathematize those
who do service by exposing the fact, but to curb that group of Jews who,
in this instance, as do other groups of Jews in other instances, bring a
stain upon the Jewish name.
The “popular” song, before it became a Jewish industry, was really
popular. The people sang it and had no reason to conceal it. The popular
song of today is often so questionable a composition that performers
with a vestige of delicacy must appraise their audience before they
sing. There are songs and choruses that can be purchased in any
reputable music store and found in many reputable parlors which cannot
be printed in this column of THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT. If they were
printed here, “Gentile fronts” would be the first to complain that this
paper was using obscenity to give interest to these articles. Yet, if
those songs were printed, this paper would be doing nothing more than
following its policy of going to Jewish sources for its material.
Americans of adult age will remember the stages through which the
popular song has passed during the past three or four decades. War songs
persisted after the Civil War and were gradually intermingled with songs
of a later time, picturesque, romantic, clean.
These latter were not the product of song factories, but the creation of
individuals whose gifts were given natural expression. These individuals
did not work for publishers but for the satisfaction of their work.
There were no great fortunes made out of songs, but there were many
satisfactions in having pleased the public taste.
The public taste, like every other taste, craves what is given it most
to feed upon. Public taste is public habit. The public is blind to the
source of that upon which it lives, and it adjusts itself to the supply.
Public taste is raised or lowered as the quality of its pabulum improves
or degenerates. In a quarter of a century, given all the avenues of
publicity like theater, movie, popular song, saloon and newspaper—in the
meantime having thrown the mantle of contempt over all counteractive
moral agencies—you can turn out nearly the kind of public you want. It
takes just about a quarter of a century to do a good job.
In other days the people sang as they do now, but not in such doped
fashion nor with such bewildering continuity. They sang songs
nonsensical, sentimental and heroic, but the “shady” songs were
outlawed. If sung at all, the “shady” songs were kept far from the
society of decent people. Like the styles of the demimonde that formerly
were seen only in the abandoned sections of cities, the songs of smut
had their geographical confinement, but like the fashions of the
demimonde they broke out of their confines to spread among polite
society.
The old songs come readily back to memory. Though years have intervened
since they were the fashion, yet their quality was such that they do not
die. The popular song of last month—who knows its name? But there are
songs of long ago whose titles are familiar even to those who have not
sung them.
Recall their names—“Listen to the Mocking Bird”—what song today has been
boosted to general acceptance on such a simple theme? The only “birds”
the people are encouraged to sing about today are “flappers” and
“chickens.”
And there were “Ben Bolt”; “Nellie Gray”; “Juanita”; “The Old Folks at
Home”; “The Hazel Dell”; “When You and I Were Young, Maggie”; “Silver
Threads Among the Gold.” What margin did these songs leave for the
suggestive, for the unwholesomely emotional?
In those days the people sang; they sang together; they sang wherever
they met; it was the days of that now extinct institution known as “the
singing school.” People could sing together. The songs were common
property, known to everybody, proper to everybody.
Is there such singing today? Hardly. At a recent meeting of young men in
a church the chorus, “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here” was called for,
and the chairman in agreeing called out “Mustn’t say the naughty word!”
With that warning the chorus was given. In calling for public singing
there is an immediate uneasiness about possible indecency. There was not
this uneasiness before the days of Jewish jazz.
In course of time the fashion of public song underwent a change. An
entirely new crop of titles appeared, dealing with an entirely different
series of subjects than the songs they displaced.
It was the period of “Annie Rooney”; “Down Went McGinty to the Bottom of
the Sea”; “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”; “After the Ball is
Over”—all of them clean, lighter than the preceding fashion in songs,
but just as clean, and also giving a true touch to life.
Sentiment was not lacking, but it was the unobjectionable sentiment of
“My Wild Irish Rose” or “In the Baggage Coach Ahead.”
The non-Jewish period was marked by songs like these: “On the Banks of
the Wabash,” by Paul Dresser; “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree”;
“When the Sunset Turns the Ocean’s Blue to Gold”; “Down by the Old Mill
Stream”; “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon,” by Jim Thornton; “The
Sidewalks of New York,” by Charles Lawlor.
There was also the “western” and “Indian” strain of songs, represented
by “Cheyenne, Cheyenne, Hop on My Pony”; “Arawanna”; “Trail of the
Lonesome Pine.”
Then came the African period, being the entrance of the jungle motif,
the so-called “Congo” stuff into popular pieces. “High Up in the
Cocoanut Tree,” “Under the Bamboo Tree,” and other compositions which
swiftly degenerated into a rather more bestial type than the beasts
themselves arrive at.
Running alongside all this was the “ragtime” style of music which was a
legitimate development of Negro minstrelsy. Lyrics practically
disappeared before the numerous “cake walk” songs that deluged the
public ear. “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”—the
marching song of the Spanish-American War, belongs to that period. The
“black and tan” resorts of the South began to reign over the nation’s
music both North and South. Seductive syncopation captured the public
ear. The term, “ma baby,” brought in on the flood of Negro melody has
remained in uncultivated musical speech ever since. Minstrelsy took on
new life. “Piano acts” made their appearance. “Jazz bands” were the
rage.
By insensible gradations, now easily traceable through the litter of
songs with which recent decades are strewn, we have been able to see the
gradual decline in the popular song supply. Sentiment has been turned
into sensuous suggestion. Romance has been turned into eroticism. The
popular lilt slid into ragtime, and ragtime has been superseded by jazz.
Song topics became lower and lower until at last they were dredges of
the slimy bottom of the underworld.
The first self-styled “King of Jazz” was a Jew named “Frisco.” The
general directors of the whole downward trend have been Jews. It needed
just their touch of cleverness to camouflage the moral filth and raise
it half a degree above that natural stage where it begets nothing but
disgust. They cannot gild the lily, but they can veil the skunk-cabbage,
and that is exactly what has been done. The modern popular song is a
whited sepulcher, sparkling without, but within full of the dead bones
of all the old disgusting indecencies. Plain print returns them to their
rightful status of disgust.
We are now in the period of “The Vamp”—that great modern goddess upon
whom tens of thousands of silly girls are modeling themselves—“The
Vamp.” The original “vamp” is to be found in a forbidden French novel
upon which Morris Gest founded his grossly immoral spectacle called
“Aphrodite.” In the Jewish popular song and the Jewish motion picture
film a unity has at last been reached in “The Vamp.” The vamp heroine
and the harem scene—a fitting climax!
There is work here for the Anti-Defamation League. That league knows how
to put the screws on anyone who disparages the Jews. From important New
York publishers, down to inconsequential country newspapers, the
Anti-Defamation League makes its power felt. There is work for it in the
movies and the popular song industry. Why does not the league put the
screws on those Jews who have degenerated the movies and debauched the
popular song movement and thus brought shame upon the racial name? Why
not? Is it possible that only the non-Jews are to be controlled, and
Jews let to run loose? Is it possible that “Gentiles” can be curbed as
by bridle and bit and that Jews cannot?
It is repeated: there is work for the Anti-Defamation League among the
Jews.
More than that: there are Jews who have begged the Anti-Defamation
League to purge the name of Jewry of the shame the liquor Jews, the
movie Jews, the popular song Jews, the theatrical Jews, and the others
are bringing on that name, and the Anti-Defamation League has not done
so. It dare not.
American Jewry is desperately afraid of opening a single seam in its
armor by means of a single investigation or reform. They are afraid of
how far the fire of self-correction may spread.
It was the intention of THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT to give in this article
a sample of the manner in which Jewish jazz is written in three
classes—No. 1 for general consumption; No. 2 for stage consumption; No.
3 for the lowest resorts. On searching through the songs for the least
offensive example it is found that even the least offensive cannot be
printed here. The fact is greatly regretted, for certainly some method
must be found by which the public can be put into possession of full
information as to what is transpiring in this hideous traffic.
The Jewish art of “camouflage” (the reader may not be aware that wartime
camouflage was a Jewish invention) has always been operative. “Cover
names”, “cover nationalities” (these are Jewish terms) have long been
known. It is quite common for Jews of the higher type to band themselves
together into societies for political and racial purposes, the purposes
being camouflaged by a name, such as Geological Society, or Scientific
Society, or something of the sort. And thus in the vilest versification,
which only a few years ago would have been refused the mails, they have
flung broadcast among the youth of the world dangerous ideas under the
camouflage of catchy tunes.
The tunes themselves carry a tale with them. There have been cases in
the courts dealing with the “adaptation,” or stealing, of tunes for
“popular song” purposes. If you observe carefully you will catch
reminiscent strains in many of the popular songs which you sing. If you
sing, “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,” and then sing, “I’m Always
Chasing Rainbows,” you will notice a basic resemblance; but that does
not prove that “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep” is itself original,
its melody was originally taken from an Opus of Chopin. This is a
practice which has been greatly extended of recent years.
The reason for the spread of this peculiar kind of dishonesty is to be
found in the Jewish policy of “speeding up business.” Ordinarily one
play a week, and one or two new songs a season, was the limit of
indulgence. But with the coming of the movies the “one play a week” plan
has been smashed to smithereens. To get the people to pay their money
every day, the programs are changed every day; and to get new plays
every day, something must be cheapened. So with songs. The output is
rushed to increase the income of money, and quality is sacrificed all
round. There are not enough good songs in the world to supply a new one
every week; not enough good plays in the world to supply a new movie
every day; and so, what the songs and plays lack in worth, they make up
in nastiness. In brief, nastiness is the constant quality on which the
producers depend to “put across” mediocre songs and otherwise pointless
plays. Nastiness is the condiment that goes with cheapness in songs and
movies.