University Place

The Midwestern Meshugas of Mickey Katz

I’m very, very pleased to introduce the next speaker, Jon Pollack, who is familiar to many of you. Jon’s been a frequent speaker at the Greenfield for many, many years. He’s on the faculty of the Center for Jewish Studies, as well as the MATC where he teaches in the history department. Jon received his PhD here at UW in the history department. He has published a number of important articles in American Jewish History, The Journal of Jewish Identities, and he has a forthcoming article in the Journal of Business History called, Shylocks to Superheroes: Jewish scrap dealers in Anglo-American popular culture. Jon knows more about Jews in the scrap metal business than anybody in the country. And as those of you from the Midwest know, that’s not a trivial thing. Jews in the scrap business is the foundation of much of Midwestern Jewish history. Jon is also just now completing a book on the history of Jews at the University of Wisconsin, called, Wisconsin, The New Home for Jews: 150 Years of Jewish Life at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This book will probably be finished, I’m sure it’ll be finished and out by the Greenfield next summer. So you’ll be hearing more about that. And, finally, I’m pleased to say, Jon and I are third cousins. Our great-grandfathers were in the bakery business together way back when. So it’s a pleasure to introduce a friend, a dear friend, family member, and colleague, Jon Pollack. (audience applauding)

– Well, thank you for that. Thank you, Tony, for that introduction, and thank you all for coming. It’s great to see so many of you again. Before I start, I just want to kind of give people a heads up. There’s going to be a large amount of Cleveland context at the start of my talk today. (audience cheering and applauding) Are there other Clevelanders in the house? There are a few, yes. Fantastic, good. I had a feeling that would be the case. So, yeah, if I get neighborhood names wrong, neighborhood boundaries, be sure to call me out on that in the Q&A. So Mickey Katz, again I thank Jody Rosen for kind of introducing him ahead of time, a big star of sort of Yiddish-inflected popular music in the mid-20th century. Also, I’d like to thank the Center for Jewish Studies and the committee that put together this year’s Greenfield for such a perfectly aligned lead-in to this talk. As Jody was talking, I was taking notes and rewrote my conclusion on the fly, so we’ll see how that goes. (audience laughing) I’m very excited to talk about this guy here. So for people who may be unfamiliar, Mickey Katz was an American jazz musician who’s best known for his Yiddish language song parodies in a period lasting from about 1949 to about 1967, with the heyday really coming in the early 1950s. And in my talk today, I want to look at– I mean, Katz’s story is fairly well-known, although I’ll go over some of the details for people who might not be familiar. But, again, I want to talk about his Cleveland context.

I want to talk about this guy who’s a second generation American, who was born to immigrant parents from Lithuania to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1909. And, in particular, Katz’s Orthodox background. That, as Jody Rosen talked about and as many of you are familiar with from the history of Jews in American entertainment, from the jazz singer in fiction to countless real-life examples, the story of Jews in entertainment is typically posited as like an either/or. The Jews can remain Jewish or they can devote their career to show business. They can change their names. They can change their shtick. They can get rid of their accent. They can put on blackface, to go to that extreme, to do all these things to conceal their true identity. And as I was writing this talk and I was thinking about Mickey Katz’s music and his career, what strikes me as fascinating about Katz is I think he managed to do both, that in a way that’s surprisingly modern. That even though this music is going to sound kind of archaic and for many of us, it’s what our parents or our grandparents listened to.

In a lot of ways, Katz’s ability to do both, to work within the Jewish world and the non-Jewish world and to seamlessly move back and forth, is something that was rather rare in the 1950s, but increasingly common in the 21st century. So Katz’s use of Yiddish, which I’ll be talking about here, I think is also interesting because he used, I contend that Katz used Yiddish to kind of parody American history and American culture, making Yiddish into a living language at a time when its obituary had been written. That for people who’ve come to previous programs here and elsewhere on the history of Yiddish in America, the 1950s are kind of, that’s the beginning of the end. The generation that spoke Yiddish as a first language was beginning to die out. The organizations that had sustained Yiddish in America saw declining membership. Formerly Yiddish language publications that had maybe an English page saw the English expand and the Yiddish contract. And, yet, Mickey Katz gives us a window into what a living Yiddish would actually sound like and did sound like for his fans in the 1950s. So, to give some background. Mickey Katz was born in Cleveland in 1909 in the 55th Street neighborhood known, at least to my family, the Cleveland side of my family, as the old, old neighborhood. It was the neighborhood of first settlement for immigrants from eastern Europe, including my grandmother who lived six blocks away from Mickey Katz on Outhwaite on the same side street off of 55th.

I was happy to find that out. A family story is that Mickey Katz gave my uncle violin lessons. However, this didn’t quite make sense to me because Katz, as we’ll see, was mostly a clarinet and occasionally a saxophone player. And then further research into Katz’s life revealed that his brother Al was in fact a professional violinist in bands and orchestras. So Uncle Marv took violin from Al Katz. Mystery solved. (audience laughing) So following the general migration of Jewish immigrants in the Cleveland area, Katz was born near 55th Street, and then, in his early teens, migrated to 105th and Superior, the Glenville neighborhood, one of the centers of Jewish life in Cleveland from the 1920s into the 1950s. And it’s there that he began his musical career. In 1923, at the age of 14, he became a professional musician. He took out his union card with the Cleveland local, the AFM, and began playing gigs after school, on weekends, and during the summers.

As you can see here on this advertisement from one of the Cleveland Jewish newspapers in 1927, one of his first print appearances in his hometown. Just to read it because the print’s kind of small. It says, Mickey Katz, WTAM broadcasting star, former solo saxophonist with Philip Spitalny and now playing at the Claremont Tent, announces his summer engagement with Johnston’s Society Orchestra, 1015 Euclid Avenue at the Wurlitzer Music Company. He personally caters to weddings, dinner dances, receptions, and all other social functions. It gives his office numbers, lists his residence phone, Glenville 8408, again referring to the neighborhood that he came out of. Music that sure is the Katz. (audience laughing) Great, the cat’s pajamas? I don’t know what he was going for in that slogan. Of note on this early announcement is Katz’s mentor, his band leader, Philip Spitalny, better known after this. Spitalny, like Katz, or like Katz’s parents more, was a Jewish immigrant from Odessa. He came to Cleveland around the time Katz was born.

Never lost his accent. Spitalny was better known for putting together a series of all-women orchestras in the 1950s, known in various incarnations of Phil Spitalny’s All Girl Orchestra. But he got his start with Mickey Katz and his group playing weddings, playing synagogue functions, playing B’nai B’rith meetings, events run by the young Jewish Federation of Cleveland in the 1920s. So Katz left Spitalny’s group in his teens and got his own band together and had a longstanding gig at the Golden Pheasant restaurant in Cleveland. I put this slide up here because, again, it speaks to a beloved part of American Jewish culture, and that’s Chinese food. (audience laughing) So the ad up here boosts the Golden Pheasant. And this is from the period of time that Katz was there. Golden Pheasant could boast excellent American and Chinese food at moderate prices amidst beautiful surroundings, a large dance floor with a snappy dance orchestra playing for you from noon to 2:30, 6:00 to 8:30, and 10:00 ’til closing. Such a delightful spot will make your visiting days more enjoyable. And you can see that it’s clearly meant as a nightclub.

There’s a huge dance floor in the middle. There’s a bandstand at one end with tables around. So it was a place to kind of get your chop suey on and then go out for a night of music and dancing to the music of Mickey Katz. During the same time he was at the Golden Pheasant, and even a little before as we saw in the previous slide, Katz had his own radio show, a very early radio performer in Cleveland, mostly telling jokes, telling comic stories. Unlike the records that Jody Rosen was able to find, unfortunately nobody bothered to preserve the early Mickey Katz sessions on WTAM. After Katz attempted, in 1930, 1931, Katz attempted to break into the music scene in New York. Cleveland, those of you who are from there and know about Cleveland, Cleveland has sort of a chip on its shoulder relative to other cities, especially New York. That people make it big, they go to New York. My grandmother, who moved to Cleveland from Hungary when she was 15 and died there at age 96, to the end of her life, was one of those people who used the term New Yorker in a pejorative way. (audience laughing) That New Yorkers connoted people who were, they think they’re better than us, they think they’re more important than us, and so forth.

And yet, at the same time, for Clevelanders to make it big, you’ve got to go to New York. In Katz’s autobiography, he talks about traveling to New York, shifting his base of operations there and trying to break into show business in New York City. Through a distant aunt of a cousin’s cousin, he finds a place to stay in a tenement. The place leaks, it’s full of roaches. He gets these terrible gigs. He deposits his card with the New York Musicians Union and nobody knows him, and so he’s trekking out to these remote gigs in the middle of nowhere and he’s working with bandleaders who can’t speak English and yell at him. After about six months, he gives it up and goes back to Cleveland. In the 1930s, though, Katz landed in a thriving music scene. In addition to playing Lake Erie cruises onboard the ship Goodtime, taking daily excursions to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, and the Lake Erie islands off the coast, playing, again, two shows per day. So just playing an enormous amount of music on a boat on Lake Erie, which can get pretty choppy.

Katz played his evenings at sort of a widely-known, but nonetheless illegal gambling houses. The gambling house here is The Ohio Villa from the late 1930s. After Prohibition ended, Cleveland’s mob got into gambling big time. There were sort of these gambling palaces in the Cleveland area. The Ohio Villa, again, for those of you familiar with Cleveland geography, it’s located in Richmond Heights on the site of what was later the Mayfair Swim and Tennis Club up there in Richmond Heights. So Katz, as is true for much of the history of jazz, Katz played for mobsters. The mobsters came to his shows. They enjoyed his music. They paid him well. He learned not to ask any questions, not to linger backstage too long or open up doors and so forth to see what was in there.

And everything went okay. Katz also– I’ll get to the next slide to explain this part. After the authorities finally shut down The Ohio Villa in 1942, Katz, with some trepidation, took a job at another nightclub, Herman Pirchner’s Alpine Village, located downtown with this kind of a German motif. Katz was well aware of the oddness of this Jewish musician, of this guy Mickey Katz with a huge following in Cleveland’s sizable community taking a job at this Alpine German-themed restaurant. And he talked to the owner about this. He talked to Pirchner and he said, “I’m flattered that you want me to work here, but a Jewish guy working in this place, it’s going to be strange, I’m not comfortable with it.” And then Pirchner walked him back to the kitchen and showed him that three of the people flicking chickens, three of the people preparing chickens in the back, were Jewish Holocaust refugees who Pirchner had hired and put to work in his restaurant. So, sealed the deal for Katz. He had a long run at Pirchner’s playing music. At the very end of World War II, Mickey Katz was tapped to lead a USO band in France during the period roughly between V-E Day and V-J Day.

So that kind of the summer of 1945, Mickey Katz took a group of musicians to France. That’s kind of the source for his interest in different parodies of Bugle Call Rag and things like that based on his brush with the military. On returning to Cleveland in 1946, a couple of things happened. First, his son Joel, now known as the entertainer Joel Grey, he got back in time for his son’s bar mitzvah. I think it’s significant that by this point in time Mickey Katz was successful enough that he had moved his family out to the brand new suburb of University Heights. I’m super proud of this one. I’m a University Heights product myself, lived there until I was 11. University Heights is a tiny suburb of Cleveland and completely built during World War II. Almost all the homes were built between about 1940 or 1950, so just before the big building boom. Katz was able to afford a house out there, but Joel Grey’s bar mitzvah was at the tiny Chibas Jerusalem Synagogue back in Glenville, a small orthodox shul that merged with a much larger Taylor Road congregation when Taylor Road fully moved into its new building in Cleveland Heights in 1950.

So during this time, Katz had had this rising career as an entertainer and, yet, he continued to belong to this tiny orthodox shul in the old neighborhood where his son had his bar mitzvah. Coming back to the United States, Katz was looking to get his band back together, started looking for gigs. He had a bar mitzvah to plan for. Katz himself was 37 at this point, kind of old to get started in the music business. And he managed to get a gig playing for his friend Jack Cohen, who was a jukebox distributor for Jonathan Carpvis. I need to talk to you about this afterwards, another possible Jewish economic niche in entertainment, jukebox distributors. So Jack Cohen, a Cleveland native, contacted Mickey Katz to play for this convention, and Katz was opening for an act that really blew up during World War II and was still super popular afterwards, band leader Spike Jones and His City Slickers. (audience laughing) He opened for– The Katz Orchestra, who was put together for this, opened up for Spike Jones. Spike Jones heard the kind of vocal effects that Mickey Katz was capable of and his between song patter with the audience and this kind of glugging effect he could do, which I’m not going to try to imitate here ’cause it’ll just gross everybody out. (audience laughing) And so in the wake of a successful convention, Katz hired Spike Jones to play for him, to play saxophone and occasionally do a little vocal.

And over here, I think I’ve captured the earliest recording we have of Mickey Katz. This is a B-side called “Jones Polka.” You can see that over here it’s kind of the B side of “I Dream of Brownie With the Light Blue Jeans.” It’s the second one down. (audience laughing) And “Jones Polka,” vocal by Mickey Katz. Here’s what that sounded like. (“Jones Polka” by Mickey Katz) Gesundheit (singing in foreign language) A salute Skol L’chaim Prosit Give-it me a cocktail When I am blue and droopy And then I’ll dance a polka And make it lots of whoopee I work-it in a coal mine Things are pretty black But tonight the drinks on me I cash-it my paycheck – [Jon] All right, so that little clip there. (audience laughing) – So that’s polka? – We can hear it’s like– First of all, yeah, it’s a polka, which is the official music of Cleveland. (audience laughing) I was there this last weekend and not one but two radio stations had polka hour on Sunday morning. It was fantastic.

I was driving around the city listening to polka. It’s sort of the official music of Cleveland in a lot of ways. A center for the Slovenian polka in particular, those of you who are fans. And also we can see that some of the characteristics that came up to those of us who are familiar with Mickey Katz coming in. He sings in this kind of high register part of his voice. It’s a very definite, kind of exaggerated, Yiddish accent there. One of the things I find kind of funny about this song in retrospect in knowing about the actual Mickey Katz versus the persona in this song in particular, is you can kind of gather from just that introduction, the song’s all about getting drunk. It’s about getting drunk and doing the polka, and Katz himself was basically a teetotaler. He drank very seldom; he drank very little. But Spike Jones on the other hand, he was out of control, as were many of the musicians in his band, to that point that Katz’s nickname for his employer and his fellow musicians was Spike Jones and His City Shickers.

(audience laughing) Using the punning there, for those unfamiliar with Yiddish, the Yiddish word for drunks. As you can kind of imagine, Katz quickly– He was much older. By the time he started touring with Spike Jones, he was 38. He was getting into his late 30s. He had a family back in Cleveland. That was really where he was rooted, and he was kind of torn that, on the one hand, this was a great opportunity. This was bigger crowds and more travel and so forth than he had ever had before. But, also, in his initial tour with Spike Jones, tragedy intervened, his mother died. So he was able– Spike Jones gave him permission to fly home to see his mother in the hospital shortly before she passed. He remained in Cleveland for the funeral.

And then, a passage he writes about in his autobiography that, again, I think is further proof of Katz’s ability to keep one foot in the modern Jewish world and one foot in the world of mid-century American entertainment. Katz said Kaddish for his mother on the road. And he talked about how this was– It was something that really opened his eyes. That the Spike Jones Orchestra played big and small towns across the country. Jones sent his band on these insane, long tours where they just had gig after gig after gig, night after night. And whenever they pulled into town, Katz would find a synagogue. He said in many small towns, there’d be a tiny congregation where the rabbi and the cantor and the Shulkhan were all the same guy. He’d explain that he was in town for a show and he was saying Kaddish, so they’d make a bunch of phone calls, they’d get a minyan together, he’d say Kaddish at the afternoon service, and he’d go on and play the show that night. So, again, it’s a way that Katz maintained his ties to Jewish tradition as his career was beginning to take off. However, as you might imagine, Katz was kind of an ill fit for the City Slickers.

Their carousing lifestyle didn’t fit with him, a solid family man with two kids and a non-drinker. And he had this kind of playful attitude toward it. There was one day before the last recordings that he’d make with Spike Jones where he was talking to Manny Klein, a trumpet player who was the only other Jewish musician on the session. And, Katz had this idea. It was thing that was kind of spinning around in his head and it was based on what he used to do on the radio in Cleveland in the early 1930s. They’re waiting between takes and he’s sitting in the studio and he leans over to Manny Klein and he says, “I’ve got this song.” And Klein’s like, “Yeah, what’s the song?” And Katz says, “It’s called Haim Afen Range.” [laughter]

And it’s: Oh, give me a Haim. . . (singing in foreign language) And so forth, and so he’s singing this Yiddish parody of “Home on the Range. ” Klein cracks up laughing and, furthermore, Katz was unaware that the microphone was on. And so on the other side of the glass were the producers, Eli Oberstein and Walt Hebner of RCA, who were overseeing the session. Both of them were Jewish, and Oberstein and Hebner crack up. Katz looks up, Klein’s kind of like (nervously mumbles). He’s miked and the guys were doubled over laughing. So, Katz got a record deal out of this. (audience laughing) They listened to this and they said this is hilarious, this will sell, we’ve got to get this stuff on record. So Mickey Katz formed a group called Mickey Katz and His Kosher-Jammers [laughter] and began preparing a show. The show that Katz created, that grew out of this, was a show called Borscht Capades, which began in the late 1940s in Los Angeles, where Katz had now moved.

Katz tried this out around the country. He took Borscht Capades to a B’nai B’rith benefit in Portland, Oregon, and it killed. He played San Antonio. It went over huge. He went back to his native Cleveland. It was a big hit. He went to Dayton. He went to Erie, Pennsylvania. He went to Miami. And everywhere he went, this was a huge, huge, huge thing, this Borscht Capades, which brought together Mickey Katz’s Kosher-Jammers with performers like Raasche and Bas Sheva, Jewish women who were from, like many of the people who Jody Rosen talked about, Jewish women from families with a long history of cantors in the family, but who, under the rules of the branches of Judaism in America at that time, would never be hired as synagogue cantors.

But they grew up in households where there was a big premium on singing, where people were good at it. And both of them recorded a series of records. Sometimes singing traditional Jewish music, other times branching off into experimental jazz and other areas. Katz worked with Jewish comedians, with Jewish dialect comedians still around at that time. Borscht Capades was a big hit in Miami, and Katz wanted to bring it to New York. Problem was Katz’s partner, the producer of the show, Hal Zeiger, had upset the owners of the theater in Miami Beach. There was an argument over royalties and who got it. And so the people who owned the theater where Katz performed Borscht Capades in Miami Beach opened up their own show called “Bagels and Yox.” In the fall of 1951, Broadway theatergoers saw not one, but two reviews of Yiddish song parodies in English. I’m going to play the opening number of Borscht Capades here.

To give you an idea of what’s going on, somebody came up and asked about this, a song called “Yiddish Square Dance. ” (“Yiddish Square Dance” by Borscht Capades) Now there is handsome Herschel Looks like Fernando Lamas His mama runs the mikveh His Aunt Kathy is the Shabbos – So in that clip there, there’s a whole lot going on, and that’s what I find, what I and current musicians have found really interesting about Mickey Katz is that, okay, so the title of the song is Yiddish Square Dance, and the only thing that’s remotely kind of square dance about that is the sort of structure of a square dance song, where a square dance, its music followed by directions from a caller telling the dancers what to do. And so, in that sense, Yiddish Square Dance follows that format, follows that kind of genre, but, of course, the material of what he’s singing about, he’s singing about Jewish stuff. He’s singing about somebody whose mother runs the mikveh, runs the Jewish ritual bath, and whose father is the caretaker of the synagogue. And the person he’s talking about looks like Fernando Lamas. Looks like a popular actor of the day. So he’s got one foot in American popular culture of 1951 and he’s got one foot in traditional Jewish culture. Throws the Yiddish in there for an audience who knows what he’s talking about, but something that would kind of fly over the heads of people who are not Yiddish speakers. And the music is not, it’s not the fiddle tunes and reels and kind of 19th century Anglo-American music that’s the foundation of square dancing, but it’s what we now call Klezmer. The song in there that you hear, the musical excerpt, is a piece that I know by the name of Zilber Khsunh, which means silver wedding.

It’s known by other names. It’s a very standard kind of Klezmer tune. And at this point in time, it’s also important, this would be a subject for someone else maybe, the term Klezmer wasn’t used. I mean, that’s a function of revival of traditional Jewish dance music in the late 1970s and 1980s. Audiences listening to this in 1951 would just know this as, yeah, this is like at a Jewish wedding, this is like Jewish musicians. It’s like there’s a wedding or something and that’s one of the songs that’s going to be on there. So, again, kind of an even more sort of overt use of traditional Jewish music for an up-to-date purpose than the Jew face singers and composers of a couple generations before. Mickey Katz was blending these two musical styles. So Bagels and Yox actually was more successful. It had a longer run than Borscht Capades, but Katz kept the show going. . . under different titles. So from Borscht Capades, this kind of launched Katz’s recording career. Over here is what we’d call an EP, and extended play record, with a lead song of Duvid Crockett. He had a prolific recording career. He released 15 EPs and LPs on Capitol Records. They tended to sell pretty well. They got brief reviews in Billboard Magazine. Billboard viewers always said they’re going to sell more, they’re going to have more plays on the jukebox in nightclubs or other venues that have a heavy Jewish audience.

But they were big and reliable sellers nonetheless. According to Katz, some of his mambo parodies from the early 1950s actually sold in record shops in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, a neighborhood that was Jewish and Chicano, where Mexican-American fans came in asking for the latest record by Miguelito Katz. (audience laughing) So with fame, though, came controversy. And here, again, not knowing what Jody was going to talk about ahead of me, I was struck by the connections between the early nineteen-teens and the early 1950s. Because very quickly, as Katz became more popular, as he kind of escaped the orbit of Jewish functions and kind of second-rate theaters and so forth and actually put out records, criticism came to follow. For example, and it’s really right at the start of his recording career in 1952, New York radio station WMCA, under a story in Billboard from August 16th, with the headline. “WMCA Bans Sensitive Wax.” Part of the story reads, “A spokesman for the station said that Capitol’s Mickey Katz discs are banned. Neither would they play other discs,” which, according to station execs, “Set up a race as a stereotype.” Criticism extended to Katz’s hometown of Cleveland.

From Billboard on June 25, 1955, Norman Big Chief Wain, WDOK Cleveland writes, “Have been getting praise from listeners for banning Mickey Katz’s latest parody on Davy Crockett. I believe the record is in bad taste and said so over the air. Have someone translate it for you and you’ll see what I mean.” And, finally, an entire, like, long-ish review by Variety editor, Abel Green. Abel Green, major overlooked character in American show business, responsible for the kind of clipped language that shows up in Variety Magazine. Under an article headed, “Duvid Crockett in Bad Taste,” signed by Abel Green. Green writes, “For some time Capitol Records and Mickey Katz have perpetrated, fractured Yiddish perversions of pop hits and for some time many in and out of the trade have wondered about this complete lack of judgment and good taste. Chiefly, it went by the board on the theory that they’re limited sellers and at best confidential hits. Which, in truth, is anything but an ostrich approach. Whether one or one million, anything malodorous isn’t diminished or aggravated by lack of numbers or otherwise. Now comes Cap’s package of four, count ’em, four such ghetto treatments of The Ballad of Davy Crockett, here called Duvid Crockett, here called C’est si bon, shrimp boats perverted into herring boats and Tweedledee just parodied in the same bad taste, which is distinguished the Katzen jammerings of this concept of ‘funny’ and ‘novelty’ recording,” with both funny and novelty in scare quotes.

another era, and there are samplings galore to substantiate this, as the Variety editors now are pouring through the archives in connection with the upcoming golden jubilee edition and come across such uninhibited show biz terms as, “coon shouters, Wop comic, Jew comic, Dutch, tad, Irish, Swedish square-head comic and the like. There didn’t exist the sensitivities of today. In actuality, these terms were kept within the confines of the trade as much as some of the racial wisecracks were still limited to tables at Lindy’s or the Stork,” a deli and nightclub in New York City. Then, to skip ahead a little bit, “but somehow Capitol and Mickey Katz recording their ghetto brand of Yiddish-English humor?” In quotes, question mark. “Are doing a disservice to many, not the least of it to themselves. It’s one thing for Homer and Jethro to parody a pop hit in their brand of hillbilly humor. But Mickey Katz’s linguistic asides, with their inside double meanings, no doubt are offensive. From the perspective of both Capitol and Katz, it smacks of a fast buck proposition, which the former doesn’t need and the performer shouldn’t. In many respects, he is wittingly or stupidly a tool, projecting a brand of dialectic ‘comedy,’ to which, undoubtedly, he’d be the first to take offense if projected in his direction.” So, let’s have a little listen.

Duvid, Duvid Crockett King of Delancey Street Duvid, Duvid Crockett This boy you’ve got to meet Born in the wilds of Delancey Street Home of gefilte fish and kosher meat Handy with a knife (singing in foreign language) He flicked him a chicken when he was only three (audience laughing)

– Yeah, so that’s how it begins. And I kind of went through the lyrics and I talked to a couple eminent translators of Yiddish I know who speak better Yiddish than I do, and the closest thing I could find to an objectionable word was the word (speaking in foreign language) that’s used to describe Duvid Crockett’s wife, and all I got from that is like it’s a cute little girl. There’s nothing objectionable in the thing. In an interesting kind of replay of the kind of dramatic trope that Jody Rosen talked about in his talk about the Jewish cowboy who goes out West and fails. In point fact, and had I known this ahead of time, I would’ve used that clip, the song Duvid Crockett ends with Duvid Crockett going to Vegas and losing his clothes and coming back to Delancey Street. So 40 years later, it’s another odd echo of the story of this mashup of Jews and the American West and their failure in that region. Nonetheless, as you can imagine, and I heard a couple of people kind of singing along with this, Jewish audiences ate this up. This was huge; you got a big laugh here. Again, I’m sure many of you had heard this in one form or another.

And I think it’s important to look at some of the parallels to what was going on elsewhere. That at the same time that self-appointed guardians of American Jewish popular culture, like the editor of Variety, like a program director at a Cleveland radio station who also was active in his Jewish federation, there’s a similar thing going on around the career of musicians like Louis Jordan and other black R&B stars of the same period of time. In my dissertation research I unearthed a report from the NAACP where NAACP board members went to a taping of The Milton Berle Show featuring Louis Jordan at the height of his career, and they were horrified that Louis Jordan, who came from rural Arkansas to Los Angeles where he brought this kind of earthy humor from rural black communities and put this on record and sold a bunch of records. NAACP leaders, similarly guardians of the image of African Americans in trying to perpetuate a certain positive image, were absolutely horrified that Louis Jordan was selling and doubly horrified that Jordan was breaking sales records in record stores in heavily African American neighborhoods. There’s a similar kind of anxiety going on that in the 1950s, the pressures that people felt to kind of deny their roots in some way, that nonetheless came back, that, again, Mickey Katz sold big records. People loved this kind of stuff. That these pressures from kind of the guardians, or self-appointed guardians of respective cultures, saw that as a threat to their idea of progress. So, as Katz’s career wound down, he found a home in Los Angeles. Going back to the title of the talk, the nightclub where Katz played gigs constantly into the late 1960s. It was a place called Billy Gray’s Band Box.

Billy Gray’s Band Box was formerly, I believe it was formerly Slapsy Maxie’s, a nightclub operated by a former prize fighter and comedian Slapsy Maxie Rosenbloom. And it was a hangout for Jewish entertainers in Los Angeles. The comedy material and the music, when people reviewed shows at Billy Gray’s, they always talked about how it was like going to the Catskills, but in Los Angeles. That it had this Jewish flavor that even nightclubs that booked other Jewish performers did not have. So over here, this is a sort of rebranding of Borscht Capades with probably a lot of the same material, updated here and there, different performers, Mickey Katz’s Halavah Hilarities, an English-Yiddish variety review featuring, among others, Katz’s son Joel Grey, and an all-star cast of American Jewish performers. So Katz ultimately returned to the Jewish world for his career, to the same audiences that nourished him all along and they gave him his start. So what then do we make of Mickey Katz? What does he show us today? How do we get something usable out of the history of Mickey Katz’s recording career? So, as I mentioned at the start, I think what’s really amazing about Mickey Katz and what’s really surprising is that he looked at Jewish culture from a position of love. That he just loved the culture he came up in. He was somebody who went to synagogue not out of obligation or out of guilt, but as somebody who was just comfortable in that world, that the milieu he came out of, the gigs that he played and so forth, that he loved playing for a 50th wedding anniversary or a Hadassah donor event or something as much as he loved playing for a nightclub in El Paso, Texas. That he lived to perform and that he just, he was, to paraphrase something that came up in the comment, he was who he was.

That there was no artifice about him. Mickey Katz is the name he was born with. Well, Meyer Katz, but close enough. He kept his name. He kept his culture. He kept his music. And in that way, as in the present day, there was lots of activity in trying to update Yiddish and bring Yiddish into the modern world. It’s important to kind of take a look back at Mickey Katz and to see how he was doing that. That an audience listening to this had to be people who were familiar with American popular culture. I didn’t even play his “You’re a Doity Dog,” his takeoff of “Hound Dog,” by Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton. That’s a whole lecture in itself. [laughter] That his audience were people who were both familiar with traditional Jewish culture and familiar with the popular culture that surrounded them in the 1950s. And Katz really said to the earlier generations of American Jewish entertainers who felt they had to choose one side or another, Katz really told us you could have both ways. Thank you very much. I’ll take some questions. (audience applauding)