Episode 55 - By Me, You're Beautiful: The Story of Bei Mir Bist du Schön

Episode 55 - By Me, You're Beautiful: The Story of Bei Mir Bist du Schön

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As Dreamtime Constant Listeners will remember, we devoted a whole show to the Andrews Sisters and their megahit of a calypso song - Rum and Coca-Cola - a song that turned out to be purloined by comic Morey Amsterdam from a Trinidad singer.

The first Andrews Sisters hit, Bei Mir Bist du Schön, wasn't stolen, but has almost as twisty a history as Rum and Coca-Cola. Bei Mir Bist du Schön was originally written in 1932 for a stage show, but the Yiddish musical the song had been crafted for closed without making much of a splash with the general public, and Bei Mir Bist du Schön probably would have disappeared into obscurity except for a perfect act of love and theft.

We'll talk about that in a second, but first let's hear the Andrews Sisters and their 1938 hit, Bei Mir Bist du Schön.

[Bei Mir Bist du Schön - The Andrews Sisters]

So, what happened between 1932, when Bei Mir Bist du Schön first appeared as a Yiddish musical number and then disappeared off the radar, and 1938 when it suddenly returned as an English-language hit for a trio of Lutheran sisters from Minnesota?

Around 1937 the song fell into the hands of an act called "Johnnie and George," two black performers who were stopping the show at the Apollo with their swing version of Bei Mir Bist du Schön...sung to their Harlem audience in the original Yiddish.

The legend goes the two were shown the song's sheet music while doing their act up at the Grossinger's summer resort in the Catskills sometime during the late `30s. They gave the song a shot, and found their Jewish audience got a kick out of hearing two black boys doing Yiddish, so Johnnie and George made it a regular part of their show. Back in town for a gig at the Apollo in 19 and 37, the pair suddenly spring a jump jive version of Bei Mir Bist du Schön on their hipster audience... which goes wild and starts swinging up and down the aisles, setting the whole Apollo to shaking according to contemporary reports.

Watching all this is Sammy Cahn, who's dropped into the Apollo on one of his regular expeditions for musical inspiration and is now laughing in amazement as he sees the joint rocking out to a song whose lyrics the only two Jews in the crowd - he and his partner - can probably understand. Knowing a hit when he hears one, Sammy Cahn tracks down the provenance of Bei Mir Bist du Schön and finds the song's authors, who are more than happy to sell it to him for the going rate of $30 - $15 bucks each.

[Left: The Andrews Sisters with Sholom Secunda, co-author of the original Bei Mir Bist du Schön]

Cahn and his partner try to get Tommy Dorsey to introduce the song at his next live gig, but the bandleader thinks the idea of a Yiddish swing song is crazy, and isn't interested. The pair next turn to Decca Records, label for the Andrews Sisters, a sister act that was trying to break out of vaudeville into the big time of R&R - radio and records - and who needed a B-side for their new single. The three Andrews Sisters are so white bread that they think the song is in Greek, but they learn the Yiddish lyrics phonetically and do the recording.

But now Decca is worried that the song will get the Andrews pegged as an ethnic act and insists that the sisters re-record it with English lyrics. Sammy Cahn and and his partner Saul Chaplin come up with an English version of the song, but now they don't want the Andrews Sisters. The songwriters argue that if they're going to the effort of writing straight lyrics to what they had intended as a throwaway Yiddish novelty number, the song should be recorded by an established singer like Ella Fitsgerald rather than by the unknown Andrews.

But eventually Decca prevails on behalf of the sisters, and the Andrews take on the new version of the old song with the Yiddish title now Germanicized and including a built-in English translation: Bei Mir Bist du Schön (Means That You're Grand). Actually, "Bei Mir Bist du Schön" doesn't mean that you're grand in either German or Yiddish - the Yiddish translates to something like, "By Me, You're Beautiful," but that probably sounded too ethnic, too.

Of all the boys I've known, and I've known some
Until I first met you, I was lonesome
And when you came in sight, dear, my heart grew light
And this old world seemed new to me
... And so I've racked my brain, hoping to explain
All the things that you do to me
Bei mir bist du schon, please let me explain
Bei mir bist du schon means you're grand

The Andrews Sisters record in November and released their single a few days after Christmas, 1937, with the A-side the Gershwin standard, Nice Work If You Can Get It. But nobody is listening to the A-side. By New Years Eve 19 and 37, Bei Mir Bist du Schön was already an established hit on New York radio stations, and by the end of January, 1938 it had sold over 350,000 copies, jumping to the Billboard #1 slot for the next five weeks. Riots would break out at record stores whenever a new shipment of the 78 or its sheet music came in. Not bad for a piece of music where most customers got the title wrong, often asking for that hit song called something like My Mere Bit of Shame or maybe Buy Me a Beer, Mr. Shane.

"It's wowing the country," reported one New Jersey paper. "They're singing it in Camden, Wilkes-Barre, Hamilton, Ohio, and Kenosha, Wisconsin. The cowboys of the West are warbling the melody and so are the hillbillies of the South, the lumberjacks of the Northwest, the fruit packers of California, the salmon canners of Alaska. [Even] the Nazi bierstuben patrons yodel it religiously, under the impression that it's a Goebbels-approved German chanty."

That last was true. Hitler himself was said to be a big fan, thinking it a proper German-American ditty, although how he reacted when he found out the song was originally Yiddish and written - and then rewritten - by a bunch of nice Jewish boys, is unknown. Bei Mir Bist du Schön stayed popular enough in Germany that the Nazi propaganda band, Charlie and His Orchestra, who you may remember from Theme Time's Season 2 More Birds show, did a version in 1942, with lyrics changed to attack that archenemy of Fascism, Bolsheviks.

[Bei Mir Bist du Schön - Charlie and His Orchestra]

Not only did Bei Mir Bist du Schön become a breakout hit for the Andrews Sisters, it started a minor craze for what became known as Yiddish Swing. Within weeks of the song hitting the charts, a New York radio station brought a show on the air called “Yiddish Melodies in Swing” that specialized in putting a swing beat to traditional Jewish folk tunes. The show proved so successful that it packed a 600-seat theater each Sunday, and ran for two decades.

[Excerpts from Yiddish Melodies in Swing]

Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin eventually got their wish, and Ella Fitzgerald covered Bei Mir Bist du Schön, as did many other singers, including Judy Garland, Benny Goodman, Steve Lawrence, and The Barry Sisters, who we just heard performing Oh Mama, I'm So in Love. Even Theme Time favorite, Slim Gaillard did a weird scat version of the song with his partner Slam, something that sounds like it would have fit right into Theme Time's Food episode.

[Bei Mir Bist du Schön - Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart]

The little Yiddish song from 19 and 32 ended up making a lot of money for a lot of people over the years, grossing as much as $3 million dollars by some estimates. It eventually sold over a million copies, giving The Andrews Sisters the first gold record ever awarded to a female vocal group.

Sammy Cahn bought his mother a house with the royalties he earned from his $30 investment. But Shalom Secunda's - the original lyricist who sold his piece of Bei Mir Bist du Schön for $15 - mother wasn't so lucky. She spent the remainder of her days praying in a synagogue for God's forgiveness, convinced that her family must have committed some awful sin for her son to have been stupid enough to give away that song for, well, a song.

And what of Johnnie and George, the two black performers whose Apollo act launched the swing version of Bei Mir Bist du Schön? Disappeared. Forgotten. Unremembered except for Sammy Cahn's story about how he stumbled over a million-dollar song one afternoon in Harlem.

Nobody even knows their last names.

Sources and Additional Reading: The Wikipedia article is relatively stark, but includes links to invaluable source material about Bei Mir Bist du Schön. Among other sources, I drew upon articles from the All About Jewish Theatre site; the "Non-Bloggish Blog"; and most especially The Yiddish Melodies in Swing site (part of the Yiddish Radio Project), which has sections dedicated to both Bei Mir Bist du Schön and the radio program Yiddish Melodies in Swing. Highly recommended reading. Also not to be missed are these two period newspaper articles on Shalom Secunda and his mother.

As is usual with these stories, some of the facts change dependent on who's doing the telling. Sometimes the black duo's names are spelled as Johnny and George. Sometimes it's Johnnie and George. Sometimes Cahn heard them at the Cotton Club. Other times it's the Apollo.

Some stories have it that Johnnie and George came up with the swing version; other stories say it was Cahn and Chaplin. Shalom Secunda claimed that their arrangement was virtually identical to the original. Who knows?

In any case, Johnny and George probably did pick the tune up at Grossinger's sometime in the `30s, possibly from Jenny Grossinger herself, the boss of that famous Borscht Belt resort, and brought it back to Harlem. Sammy Cahn probably did hear it somewhere in Harlem and bought the rights from someone, sometimes it's directly from Shalom Secunda and his partner for $30, sometimes it's from their publishers, who according to Secunda acted as an intermediary and paid the two $30, reselling limited rights to Cahn and Co. for an undisclosed amount while still retaining the publishing rights.

The song went on to gross an estimated $3 million dollars over the next 20-odd years until the copyright expired in 1961 and reverted back to Secunda and his partner Jacobs. They renegotiated a new deal with the publishers and happily finally saw some money from their tune nearly three decades after writing it. And as I said, Johnny and George, or maybe Johnnie and George, disappeared without a trace after popularizing a Yiddish song in Harlem - a reverse case of Love and Theft.

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With Theme Time Radio Hour on hiatus, Dreamtime is on a once-a-month podcast schedule for the duration. We'll be back in July with a new show. Thanks as always for listening, and remember to enter our Dreamtime Constant Listener Contest, underway right now. Send us an email with your guess on the date that Theme Time Radio Hour returns with Season 3, and get the opportunity to win a copy of Million Dollar Bash, as well as a CD of Poetry Readings direct from the Dreamtime studio with those nifty stewART covers.

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You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

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The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.

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Christmas Island - The Andrews Sisters

How'dja like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island?

I have to say that from snowy New Hampshire's perspective, the prospect looks inviting. I wish I could have found the Bob Atcher and Dinning Sisters version as video, since it's the music I think of when I think of Christmas Island, but the Andrews Sisters do a nice turn on this song from 19 and 46.

Another one of the "sisters" singing acts popular in the 40s and 50s, The Dinning Sisters were probably best-known in the Midwest. Three sisters, twins Jean and Ginger and sister Lou, were winning amateur singing contests before the age of ten, and later began to perform with older brother Ace Dinning's orchestra. The young ladies eventually made their way to Chicago, where they were picked up by NBC Radio and ultimately became the highest paid radio act in the Windy City. And an interesting piece of trivia for you, Jean Dinning wrote the song "Teen Angel" later in her career.

One of the more popular entertainers of the post WWII-era, Bob Atcher had a 21-year career at OKeh and Columbia Records, as well as being a featured performer on the WLS National Barn Dance out of Chicago. His range of material ran from traditional country to comic novelty songs. In 1948, Atcher cut two of the earliest LPs ever released by Columbia, a pair of discs devoted to cowboy songs and folk music.

The Andrews Sisters - LaVerne, Maxene, and Patti - are still probably the most successful female vocal group of the 20th century in the U.S. having 113 singles chart entries between 1938-1951, an average of more than eight per year. Their second Decca single, Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,"an Anglicized version of a Yiddish song, became their first hit, making ts first appearance on Your Hit Parade on January 8, 1938, and charting at #1 two weeks later.

The Andrews Sisters premiered their own weekly network radio show, Eight-to-the-Bar Ranch - as in Beat Me Daddy... - at the end of 1944, and had one of their biggest hits with Rum and Coca-Cola which went to #1 in February 19 and 45, becoming the top single of the year. That song, as Constant Listeners to TTRH or Dreamtime know, was not written by Morey Amsterdam no matter what the copyright says, but by Lord Invader and Lionel Belasco.

Episode 14 - Working for the Yankee dollar

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This is the Dreamtime podcast - occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour weekly show.

If you follow Bob Dylan, and I would assume you do if you listen to Dreamtime, you're probably aware of last week's NY Times article about Dylan reworking several lines from various poems by an all-but-forgotten 19th century poet, Henry Timrod, into the lyrics of songs from Modern Times.

I think while it's obvious Timrod is a source, I don't think there's much to get excited about, especially if you go to the trouble to compare Timrod's work versus Dylan's work. The lines and phrases are used in completely different ways to produce completely different works, in my opinion. I'm not going to weigh in on the debate past that except recommending - if you're interested - that you go check the lines in question both in their original form and in Dylan's version, as I did.

Timrod's poems are reproduced on many internet sites and there's an excellent site annotating Modern Times' lyrics that's worth your while to visit. I'll link to those sites in this episode's show notes.

I bring all this up only because I recently did a "sources of 'Love and Theft,'" in episode 12, and this week's episode is on the famous plagiarism story behind "Rum and Coca-Cola." Fwiw, I had both episodes planned long before the Modern Times story, and I don't want my listeners thinking I'm promoting some sort of hidden agenda of criticism against Dylan.

As with "Love and Theft," Modern Times is filled with references, allusions, sampling, and reworking from both ancient and contemporary sources. And personally, I find locating Dylan's sources a fascinating and enlightening exercise. And, as with "Love and Theft," I look forward to discovering the sources behind Modern Times. 'Nuff said.

On to this week's episode 14 - Working for the Yankee dollar

[Andrews Sisters - "Rum and Coca-Cola"]

"Rum and Coca-Cola" has a very twisty history. A huge hit for the Andrews Sisters, selling over seven million copies after its release in 1945, the melody apparently began life as a Martinique folk song sometime in the 19th century. In 1906, Lionel Belasco, a Trinidadian pianist, composer and bandleader, used that melody and added lyrics and the title, "L'Année Passée."

As Dylan mentions in an introduction to another song, Calypso often acts as a cultural meme, reporting important social and political news - and always opinion - to people without access to newspapers, radios, or television. "L'Année Passée", or "Last Year," in English, tells the story of the downfall of a daughter of a prominent Trinidad family, who ends her days as a prostitute walking the Trinidad streets.

["L'Annee Passee" excerpt]

Last year [the song goes], Last year I was a little girl
Living with my dear mother at home;
This year I am a woman though,
On the streets you will find me roam.

Luckily for Belasco, even though he never recorded the song, nor apparently put the lyrics to paper until the 1940s, he did submit "L'Année Passée" among several other songs to a publisher, who copyrighted it in 1943.

Sometime between 1942 and 1943, Rupert Westmore Grant, a Calypso singer known professionally as "Lord Invader," composed the words to "Rum and Coca-Cola." Lord Invader's version, in the tradition of Calypso, is a complaint about American G.I.'s ah, "relationships," with the local women who, as the song goes, "saw that the Yankees treat them nice / and they give them a better price." In fact, the final stanza of the Lord Invader version relates a bride running away with a US soldier lad, driving her "stupid husband" "staring mad" in the process.

The lyric was copyrighted in Trinidad in February of 1943 and Lord Invader began to sing the song publicly in March using a reworked version of "L'Année Passée" as the melody. In court, Grant claimed that he hadn't tried to copyright the music in the belief that it belonged to Belasco, as it did.

In September of 1943, Morey Amsterdam arrived in Trinidad as an entertainer for the U.S.O. He stayed for about a month, during a period when Lord Invader's "Rum and Coca-Cola" was at the peak of its popularity. Amsterdam's testimony about how he supposedly wrote the song was rife, in the court's terms, with contradictions and improbabilities. He claimed never to have heard the Lord Invader version and came up with the idea for the song when he heard a soldier sing the words, "Rum and Coca-Cola kill the Yankee soldier" to the melody of "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More." That inspired him, Amsterdam claimed, to write the "Rum and Coca-Cola" lyrics, and put the song into his show, still using the "Ain't Gonna Rain No More" tune.

Back in New York, Amsterdam reportedly offered the song to a now long-forgotten singer, Jeri Sullivan, who commissioned Paul Baron, she said, to write the music. In testimony equally as torturous as that offered by Amsterdam, Baron claimed to have based his music - mysteriously identical to that of Belasco's - on a Spanish melody and on a song he called "King Jaja." Baron was possibly smoking King Jaja at the time, since he couldn't identify that song, its origin, or who had sung it.

In any case, if you're a collector of obscure Andrews Sisters items, you might want to search out one of the first 200,000 singles of "Rum and Coca-Cola," listing Amsterdam as sole composer of both lyrics and music. For reasons unknown, but probably having something to do with the fact that "Rum and Coca-Cola" was a mega hit, Jeri Sullivan and Paul Baron quickly consulted a lawyer, and in the credits after 1944, Amsterdam, Sullivan, and Baron are all listed as co-composers and copyright holders.

Maybe because of bad karma, the Andrews Sisters version of the song had a troubled career, even though a million-selling record. The sisters were recording two songs for Decca, and finding they still had 30 minutes of session time, they decided to record "Rum and Coca-Cola," even though they had only seen the song for the first time the night before. Patty Andrews recalled, "We hardly really knew it, and when we went in we had some extra time and we just threw it in, and that was the miracle of it. It was actually a faked arrangement. There was no written background, so we just kind of faked it."

Kind of appropriate, don't you think? While the record would prove a enormous hit, only surpassed by The Tennessee Waltz and White Christmas, it was banned from the radio. First, because it mentioned rum; and at that time you couldn't mention liquor on the air. Then, there was the "Coca-Cola" problem. Free advertising in the eyes of Coke's competitors.

And, that didn't even get to the lyrics, which even in Amsterdam's sanitized version, made it pretty obvious that the mother and daughter's work for the Yankee dollar meant more than oiling up the soldier's weapons… if you get my drift. Maybe that's why the Andrews never included "Rum and Coca-Cola" in any of their films.

In 1947, the copyright holder of Lord Invader's original lyrics - not Lord Invader himself - prosecuted a successful infringement case against Amsterdam and the US publisher of "Rum and Coca Cola." And in 1949, the copyright holder of "L'Année Passée," - who wasn't the composer, Belasco - successfully sued the publisher again.

Reportedly, both Belasco and Lord Invader eventually received six-figure payments in settlement, I assume from the copyright holders who had won the cases. But ironically, the infringers would retain their copyright to "Rum and Coca-Cola." And as Dylan says, people still think Morey Amsterdam wrote the song. In fact, if you go to Amsterdam's page on the International Movie database site, you'll see "Rum and Coca-Cola" listed in his credits.

So, ask yourself, who wrote "Rum and Coca-Cola?" Morey Amsterdam, U.S. copyright holder, who slightly changed some lyrics to a song he heard in Trinidad? Lord Invader, who put new lyrics to a song written by Lionel Belasco in the early 1900s? Lionel Belasco, who adapted his music from a folk song from the 1800s?

And how far back does the thread stretch from there? Who originally wrote the music that would evolve into "Rum and Coca-Cola"?

[Lord Invader - "Rum and Coca-Cola" excerpt ]

This has been Fred Bals with the Dreamtime podcast - occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour weekly show. Dreamtime is not associated with XM Radio or Bob Dylan. No names were changed to protect the innocent in tonight's podcast. Until next time, hold tight on to your dreams.

Sources: Lord Invader - "Rum and Coca Cola" excerpt; Legal opinion by New York District Judge Simon Rifkind, who ruled that the music to "Rum and Coca-Cola" infringed upon the copyright to Lionel Belasco's song, "L'Année Passée."; The Mudcat Cafe, a website devoted to folk musicology, has a forum thread that discusses the song, with postings that include the full lyrics of both the Lord Invader and Morey Amsterdam versions, as well as the lyrics to "L'Année Passée" and some alternative, more ribald lyrics for "Rum and Coca-Cola" that Amsterdam reportedly sang when entertaining troops. ("She wear grass skirt but that's O. K. / Yankee like to hit the hay.") Links via Wikipedia which provides an overview of the "Rum and Coca-Cola" story.