Yinglish Popular Music: Mickey Katz, the Barton Brothers, and Allan Sherman

This is a seminar course and enrollment will be capped at around 25 students.

Instructor: Ronald Robboy

In the years immediately following the Second World War, the Barton Brothers, an anarchic Catskill comedy duo, began recording humorous bilingual parody songs that relied in no small part on Yiddish theater and radio for raw material. The Bartons, however, were not the only ones recording Yinglish novelty songs. Molly Picon, Menasha Skulnik, and others were likewise exploring this territory as the post-war boom in sound recordings offered new creative possibilities. More than any, though, it was “Joe & Paul,” the Barton Brothers’ send-up of Yiddish radio, that became a bona fide hit record. In turn, inspired clarinetist Mickey Katz, based in Los Angeles and working with first-call studio players, to begin recording his own exceedingly funny Yiddish-mixed-with-English lyrics set to the melodies of current Hit Parade songs. Katz’s successful albums all through 1950s then inspired Allan Sherman, an erstwhile TV game show producer to begin recording his own parodies of standards and folk songs that achieved meteoric success in the 1960s. Though hardly any of Sherman’s hit records had actual Yiddish content, many still had a clearly Jewish inflection that often alluded, whether phonetically, grammatically, or syntactically, to Yiddish beginnings.

After acquainting ourselves with some of those Yinglish novelty recordings by Picon, Skulnik, and others, we will do close readings of tracks by the Barton Brothers, and then focus particularly on Mickey Katz, before closing with an appreciative look at Allan Sherman’s work. For all these artists, we will consider their language, their music, their delivery, and what made them so influential and so very funny.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally to students throughout the class.

Ronald Robboy is a musician and independent scholar of Yiddish theater music. He was for many years a cellist in the opera and symphony orchestras of San Diego. His own music has been heard at both The Kitchen and MOMA in New York City, and in 1995 the San Diego Jewish Film Festival commissioned his score to Molly Picon’s silent East and West. Active in the earliest years of the West Coast klezmer revival, Robboy’s work with poet Jerome Rothenberg led to the creation of his experimental Big Jewish Band. As Senior Researcher for the Thomashefsky Project, and working closely with Chana Mlotek z'l at the YIVO Archives, he developed the reconstructions of Yiddish theater scores that conductor Michael Tilson Thomas took to Carnegie Hall. Robboy has written for Encyclopaedia Judaica and Perspectives of New Music. Earlier this year, he taught in the YIVO-Bard Winter Program, and his study “Abraham Ellstein’s Film Scores” appeared in the Polin yearbook this spring. With Goldfaden scholar Alyssa Quint, he is co-editing a critical edition of the operetta Shulamis (1880) for Dusseldorf University Press (forthcoming).

**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save $21 right now, and more on future classes and public programs tickets.