Alterman Concert Explores Jewish Popular Music History

During a recent evening of familiar toe tapping melodies, Joe Alterman and his jazz trio guided his audience at the Marcus Jewish Community Center in Dunwoody through a brief history of the Jewish influence on popular music in America.

The Atlanta musician grew up in a prominent Jewish family. Although other members of the Alterman family chose business careers, he said he chose to become a musician partly as a way to come to terms with his life and his faith. In recent years, he’s served as Artistic and Executive director of Neranenah, the local Jewish concert and culture series.

As he freely admitted, he found in the jazz that he explored as a young person a way both to understand himself and his life as a Jew. In that way, perhaps he was not unlike the long list of Jewish-American composers who transformed themselves and American music through the songs they wrote and the lyrics that went along with them.

Starting with the music of Irving Berlin, who wrote his first big international hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” in 1911, Jewish song writers, as Alterman pointed out, were at the heart of the explosive growth of popular music in America. As their power and influence grew, they helped to redefine Americans to themselves.

“Irving Berlin wrote such important songs as ‘White Christmas,’ ‘God Bless America,’ and ‘Easter Parade,’” Alterman said. “As Philip Roth, the famous Jewish novelist famously wrote, Irving Berlin turned the two of America’s major religious holidays, Christmas and Easter, into holidays about snow with ‘White Christmas’ and shopping with ‘Easter Parade.’”

George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin (left) are pictured composing their last song, “Our Love Is Here To Stay.”

Through their music they often became richer and more financially secure than the more famous singers and instrumentalists who played it. Berlin claimed to have taken less than 15 minutes to write down the tune that became his first smash hit. He was only 23 when he wrote it. Sales of the sheet music, which was the way hits were calculated in those days, sold million copies the first year.

A decade later, George Gershwin repeated the success, with “Swanee,” a signature tune for the most popular singer of the day, the Jewish Al Jolson. The lyrics by Irving Caesar, were said to have been put together in only 10 minutes while he was riding a bus. With the money he made off their hit, Gershwin was able to concentrate on more serious projects, such as the 1935 folk opera, “Porgy and Bess.” He died suddenly of a brain tumor in 1937. Alterman included a sensitive and reflective reading of Gershwin’s last song, “Our Love Is Here To Say.” George Gershwin’s longtime collaborator, Ira Gershwin, added the lyrics after his brother’s death.

In the Gershwin body of work as with Berlin’s, as Alterman pointed out in his program, there is the quality of being not quite a part of the America they so influenced. Those who came here as impoverished immigrants were trying to find freedom after living where they were oppressed and stifled. In America they found a refuge, but many were, he maintains, still outsiders, observers of life, with their faced pressed against the window.

“To me it’s really fascinating that Berlin really represents this outsider, insider thing,” Alterman observed. “Many of them never felt fully accepted in this nation of immigrants. But it was enough for a lot of these Jewish composers just to be happy to be living in America. They really wanted to embrace being American.”

When Berlin married Ellin Mackay, a Roman Catholic heiress in 1926, her father disowned her because she had married a Jew. As a wedding gift, Berlin gave his wife the publication rights to his hit, “Always,” so she would feel financially secure. They were married 62 years.

To me it’s really fascinating that Berlin really represents this outsider, insider thing. Many of them never felt fully accepted in this nation of immigrants. But it was enough for a lot of these Jewish composers just to be happy to be living in America. They really wanted to embrace being American.

It’s probably impossible to calculate the contribution that Jews have made to popular music, but one of Alterman’s mentors, Ben Sidran, who has lectured on the history of American music at Ahavath Achim Synagogue, estimates Jews have contributed as much as 80 percent of this country’s most important popular works.

In his important study, “There Was A Fire: Jews, Music and The American Dream,” Sidran traces the influence Jews have had on this nation’s melodies. For him, his interest in studying the role of music in Jewish life began at a Rosh Hashanah service in 1981 when he approached the person leading the service and asked if he could help with the musical performance. As he wrote in his book, which was finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards, the music stirred him in ways he couldn’t fully explain.

So, too, for Alterman, as he led his trio, with authority and a strong sense of purpose through his own Jewish journey — and how the music that Jews have created has changed his life.