Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen

From the Yiddish Radio Project:

The story of this tune's stratospheric rise is as unlikely as that of Yiddish swing itself. “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” was composed by Sholom Secunda for a 1932 Yiddish musical that opened and closed in one season. Fast-forward to 1937. Lyricist Sammy Cahn and pianist Lou Levy were catching a show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem when two black performers called Johnnie and George took the stage singing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" -- in Yiddish. The crowd went wild. Cahn and Levy couldn't believe their ears. Sensing a hit, Cahn convinced his employer at Warner Music to purchase the rights to the song from the Kammen Brothers, the twin-team music entrepreneurs who had bought the tune from Secunda a few years back for the munificent sum of $30.

Cahn gave "Bei Mir" a set of fresh English lyrics and presented it to a trio of Lutheran sisters whose orchestra leader, oddly enough named Vic Schoen, had a notion of how to swing it. The Andrews Sisters' debut 78 rpm for the Decca label hit almost immediately. The era of Yiddish swing had begun.

"Bei Mir" would soon be covered by virtually every pop and jazz artist of the age, and was even retranslated into French, Swedish, Russian -- and German. (The song was a hit in Hitler's Germany until the Nazi Party discovered that its composer was a Jew, and that the song's title was Yiddish rather than a south German dialect.)

Comments

[DRaftervoi]

Hey, there's an odd coincidence: last week, we discovered the Puppini Sisters, an act that recreates the sound of the Andrews Sisters and also applies their Swing Era sound to modern songs. Check 'em out on YouTube...anyway, after we listened to the Puppini Sisters covering the Smiths' "Panic," we wanted to show my daughter what the original Andrews Sisters sounded like...and so we have been watching the Andrews Sisters on YouTube, too.

[alisa]

This was great. I am going to show it to husband. He has a love of swing music, which eventually evolved into Western Swing through Milton Brown and then Bob Wills. He is the one who found the Jewish Western Swing for me to send to you!! Thanks for sharing the information behind this song.

[AndyJ]

I sang this as a child.... Loved the song and the spirit...
Being Jewish or not mattered little to me... It was good and it was fun... I have held on to that standard ever since...

I have mentioned that when I was a child, we had more Jewish folks in our county than Catholic... That's the way the world worked... It seemed the way things should be... I had a very lucky childhood...

[Gail]

Glad you all enjoyed it. I bought a copy of the Yiddish Radio Project's CD a while ago, and it has many interesting songs on it, including Bei Mir Bis Du Schoen. The music illustrates the great enthusiasm with which newly assimilating Jews embraced American culture in the 30s and 40s. Samples of the tracks can be heard here.