[Live on Zoom] The Barton Brothers, Mickey Katz, and Others: Yiddish-English Bilingual Parody Songs

Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series See all lectures » Admission: Free Registration is required. Watch the video

Ronald Robboy | Delivered in English.

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In the years immediately following the Second World War, the Barton Brothers, an anarchic Catskill comedy duo, began recording humorous macaronic (that is, bilingual) parody songs that relied in no small part on Yiddish theater and radio for raw material. The Bartons’ unexpected success—their send-up of Yiddish radio, “Joe & Paul,” was a bona fide hit, however improbable—inspired clarinetist Mickey Katz, based in Los Angeles and working with first-rate studio players, to begin recording his own exceedingly funny Yiddish-mixed-with-English lyrics set to the melodies of current Hit Parade songs. Capitol Records issued (possibly to their own amazement) a steady stream of these Yinglish albums by Katz all through the 1950s and into the ‘60s. These in turn inspired Allan Sherman, a TV gameshow writer/producer, to begin recording his own parodies of standards and folk songs. Though hardly any of Sherman’s lyrics had actual Yiddish content, many still had a clearly Jewish inflection that often alluded—phonetically, grammatically, or syntactically—to Yiddish beginnings.

Close readings of selected tracks by the Bartons, by Katz, and by Sherman will focus on their language, their music, their delivery, and what made them so influential and so very funny.

About the Speaker

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).