Jerome Kern (1885-1945) was born in New York City to Henry, a Jewish German immigrant father, and Fanny, an American Jewish mother of Bohemian descent. Though raised Jewish, his parents hid all signs of their Jewish heritage to facilitate their full assimilation into American society, and their wedding was the last time that either entered a synagogue; perhaps not surprisingly, Jerome never manifested any interest in Judaism or in Jewish practice.
Ironically, Henry looked down on his son’s musical ambitions as being on the level of the klezmer musicians who played for a meal at Jewish celebrations or for coins in the streets, but Fanny, herself an accomplished pianist, encouraged her son musically and taught him to play piano.
Kern’s remarkable melodic gifts and his important innovations – popularizing the ballad, modernizing musical comedy, and creating the modern American operetta – have won him near universal recognition as the father of the American musical theatre as we know it today. He wrote more than 700 songs used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as “They Didn’t Believe Me,” “Ol’ Man River,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “A Fine Romance,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and “All the Things You Are,” and won two Oscars for Best Original Song (he was nominated eight times), for “The Way You Look Tonight” (1936) and “The Last Time I Saw Paris” (1941).
He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era and created dozens of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films in a career that lasted more than four decades. Underscoring the scope of Kern’s contributions, when Irving Berlin was asked in an interview to describe American musical theatre, he answered “Jerome Kern.”
Unlike the work of George Gershwin and Harold Arlen, which incorporated cantorial melodies, and Irving Berlin’s compositions, which included Yiddish comedy numbers, the Jewish influences in Kern’s songs are less evident. He rarely spoke about the impact of his Jewish heritage on his music, though he once commented, presumably in jest, that everything he wrote was Jewish music for the simple reason that he was a Jew. In one illustrative story, after Kern announced he would be collaborating with Oscar Hammerstein in writing music for a play based on the life of Marco Polo, Hammerstein asked: “Your new musical is based on an Italian who crossed the Alps and then the Leviathan desert, got to Mongolia, then China and finally returned home to Italy. For heaven’s sake, what type of music will you compose?” Without missing a beat, Kern replied “nice Jewish music.”
But, in fact, little of Kern’s work reflects his Jewish background, though many commentators seek to discover Jewish themes and patterns in some of his melodies and elements of old Yiddish folksongs in some of his ballads. One example of his use of a particularly Jewish setting is the Kern-Harburg song “And Russia was Her Name” from the movie “Song of Russia,” which was sung on the soundtrack by the famous cantor Moishe Osher (under the pseudonym Walter Lawrence). Though reportedly proud of being Jewish, Kern was no Zionist and, in fact, opposed Zionist efforts to settle Holocaust survivors in Eretz Yisrael.
Kern’s greatest and most enduring work is indisputably “Show Boat” (1927), with libretto and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. Among its other great innovations, it was the first musical to be based upon a novel, Jewish writer Edna Ferber’s work of the same name; it was perhaps the first Broadway production to merge the storyline and musical numbers into an integrated narrative; and it presented the first cast of freely integrated black and white players on the American stage. The show opened on Broadway at the Ziegfeld Theatre on December 27, 1927 and ran for 572 performances.
“Show Boat” generated several Broadway standards, including “Make Believe” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” but its brilliant anthem was a grievance sung by a former slave about the mindless old Mississippi River. Essentially the prison elegy of a people whose only crime was their skin color, “Ol’ Man River,” which remains one of the most beloved show tunes of all time, served as the show’s unifying theme, contrasting the struggles and hardships of African Americans with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River and turning the Mississippi into a metaphor for the white man’s indifference: “What does he care if the world’s got troubles?/What does he care if the land ain’t free?”
Ironically, Kern had never actually seen the Mississippi River when he wrote the song. Hammerstein credits his inspiration for the lyrics to the closing verse of Tennyson’s “The Brook”: “For men may come, and men may go, but I go on forever.” (“But Ol’ Man River, he just keeps rollin’ along . . .)
Exhibited here is what is surely one of the great Broadway collectible treasures of all time, an original handwritten musical quote of “Ol’ Man River’ signed and titled by Kern. The written notes correspond to the lyric “Ol’ Man River, dat Ol’ Man River . . .”
Despite its popularity, “Ol’ Man River” was initially written not as a foundation for the show but, rather, as a means to conclude the first scene. However, few people know that it nonetheless played a decisive role in bringing “Show Boat” to the stage in the first instance. Kern was unsuccessful in convincing author Ferber that the show was stage-worthy until he went to her apartment and played “Ol’ Man River” for her on her piano; according to Ferber’s autobiography, “My hair stood on end, the tears came to my eyes, I breathed like a heroine in a melodrama . . . such music would outlast Jerome Kern’s day and mine.” And indeed it has.
“Ol’ Man River” was first performed in the original stage production of “Show Boat” on December 27, 1927 by Jules Bledsoe, who also sang it in the part-talkie 1929 film and recorded the song years later. However, undoubtedly the most famous rendition of the song was sung by Paul Robeson – who had performed it in the show’s 1928 London production and in its 1932 Broadway revival – in James Whale’s classic 1936 film version of “Show Boat.”
The African American Robeson had established a reputation as a college and professional football star, lawyer, film and Broadway actor, concert singer, powerful international political activist, and author.
In another of my favorite generally unknown “Jewish angles” on famous people, Robeson first came to Kern’s attention in Kern’s grandfather’s synagogue, where he sang for 25 years. Robeson famously commented that “from the songs preached or spoken by Negroes in their religious life, and in their deep trouble under slavery, it is only a step to the beautiful songs of the Jewish people which are sung or chanted in their synagogues.”
He often performed Jewish songs, including a version of “Eli, Eli” and Yiddish songs, including “Zog Nit Kayn Mol,” a tribute to Jews who died resisting the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. But his favorite was “The Hassidic Chant of Levi Isaac (of Berditchev),” which he described as “A kaddish that is close to my heart.”
Even to date, “Show Boat” is condemned in some quarters as a racist drama that, as a supposedly prime example of “hate literature,” romanticizes a dehumanizing era in black history and debases black life and culture. More recently, however, an additional ingredient has been added to the mix: anti-Semitism. Some black protesters now argue not only that that Jews are “responsible” for “Show Boat” – and, indeed they are, as its author (Ferber), composer (Kern), and lyricist (Hammerstein) were all Jewish – but also that they are somehow answerable for most racist literature and theatre productions.
Thankfully, most producers ignore the protests, refuse to tamper with the text or music to be consistent with contemporary values, and continue to stage their revivals. Despite modern political revisionism, “Show Boat” and “Ol’ Man River” will live forever.
