Music history/trivia

HCPhilly

We did a recent gig where we played the song mentioned below.
One of the audience members sent me an email with the story of the song, and it was so good I eally wanted to share it with you all.

They called themselves Johnny and George, and they
played the Apollo
Theatre and any other gigs they could get one hot
summer in the 1930s.
Somewhere along the way, they managed to get a
booking at
Grossinger's up in the Catskills. Not bad. Free meals,
you make a few
bucks and you're out of New York City for a little
while , beating all

that August heat that could blow down the sidewalks of
125th St. like
a
blast furnace.
One day Jenny Grossinger showed them the music sheets
for this
Yiddish song called "Bei Mir Bist du Schon," and
Johnny and George had

a little fun with it, with never a clue that what they
had here was
going to become one of the biggest hits of their time
- but not for
them.
So summer's over now, and Johnny and George are back
down at the
Apollo, and they decide to open with this Grossinger's
song. They sing

it straight through in Yiddish, but they kick up the
beat and they
get
it rocking. And then they get it rocking more. The
crowd goes
wild. Everybody's dancing. The Apollo has never heard
anything like
this. Two black guys singing a swing version of a
Yiddish song? In
Yiddish?
Watching all this from the balcony that night were
two up-and-coming
songwriters, Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, and they
both knew a
sensation when they heard one. Who owned the rights to
this song? they

wondered. And what would they want for them? Checking
it out, Cahn and

Chaplin learned that the lyrics had been written by
one Jacob Jacobs,
who, with his music-writing partner Sholom Secunda,
had composed "Bei
Mir Bist du Schon" for a Yiddish production called "I
Would If I
Could." They'd already tried to sell it to Eddie
Cantor, with no luck.

When Cahn offered $30, they were happy to accept. This
was nothing
unusual for them. They'd sold hundreds of songs for
$30 apiece. Cahn
and Chaplin went straight to Tommy Dorsey with their
new $30
song, urging the bandleader to play it at the
Paramount Theater.
Dorsey
wasn't interested. Well, it was in Yiddish, he
explained. So Cahn and
Chaplin translated the lyrics into English. And then
they took the
tune
to this new group of girl singers. The Andrews
Sisters, they called
themselves. It happened that the sisters were then
recording a
Gershwin song called "Nice Work if You Can Get It,"
and it was decided

that "Bei Mir Bist du Schon" would work okay as the B
side:
"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' record was released a few days after
Christmas 1938. By
New Year's Eve it was playing over and over again on
every radio
station in New York City. It started when "The
Milkman's Matinee" on
WNEW picked it up and played it on the all-night show.
Soon there were

near riots at the record stores. Crowds would line up
and the song
would be played out into the street from loudspeakers.
Traffic would
back up for blocks. By the end of January, "Bei Mir
Bist du Schon" had

sold more than 350,000 copies.
"Bei Mir Bist du Schon" fever spread across the land.
"It's wowing
the
country," reported one New Jersey paper. "They're
singing it in
Camden, Wilkes-Barre, Hamilton, Ohio, and Kenosha,
Wis. The cowboys of

the West are warbling the undulating melody and so are
the hillbillies

of the South, the lumberjacks of the Northwest, the
fruit packers
of California, the salmon canners of Alaska." And it
was huge hit in
Yorkville: "The Nazi bierstuben patrons yodel it
religiously, under
the impression that it's a Goebbels-approved German
chanty.
" I could say Bella Bella, even say Voonderbar, Each
language only
helps me tell you how grand you are."
Over in Germany, Hitler himself was a big fan.
Finally, the Third
Reich had a tune it could hum to. At least until it
was discovered
that
the thing had been written by two Jews from Brooklyn.
Over the years,
"Bei Mir Bist du Schon" made millions of dollars for a
lot of singers
and record companies. Finally, in 1961, after standing
on the
sidelines
and watching the royalties ring up over the years for
a song that
they'd made 15 bucks each on, Secunda and Jacobs got
the rights back.
As for Johnny and George, who started all the
excitement one night at
the Apollo up in Harlem, it goes unrecorded whatever
became of them,
or
even what their last names were.

Stackabones

Great story! Thanks for posting that.

btw ... with all those line breaks, it looks like a free verse narrative poem!