Jewish men and women have long had an important presence in Anglophone popular music. This has included backstage roles in management, production, promotion, and composition, and stage-front identities as performers, all the way from Al Jolson to Amy Winehouse. We now have a fair number of studies attending to this presence, though the emphasis has been mainly on composers and performers, and on the USA. In Jon Stratton’s welcome addition to this literature, he maintains the primary focus on composers and performers, but also shifts attention to Britain and Australia.
The significance of this is threefold. Firstly, not only has Jewish involvement in American music already been widely explored, but our familiarity with the details of Jewish lives in North America also derives from their coverage both in historical and sociological work, and in the literary fiction of authors like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Chaim Potok. Secondly, Jewish involvement in British popular music has not been as extensively studied, despite its centrality and range, and there is no equivalent Anglo-Jewish literary canon even though there have been significant Jewish writers in Britain. The third virtue in looking elsewhere outside of the States is that it enables Stratton to examine what is continuous and different in Jewish contributions to popular music across different national contexts. The distinctive racialized structures of the three countries he investigates have inevitably influenced how people have been constructed as Jewish, so there are interesting comparative issues to be explored in Jewish experience within America, Britain, and Australia. Exploring these is vital if we are to develop a better understanding of the reasons for the centrality of the Jewish presence in modern popular music.
The chapter on Australia unravels some of the racial entanglements which have prevailed there by way of a parallel discussion of two female singers, Renée Geyer and Marcia Hines. Geyer, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, became famous as a singer of soul and funk material. Since her Jewishness was associated with blackness in Australia, singing in the idioms and styles of African Americans enabled Geyer, on the blackface principle, to appear more white and so more acceptable to white people. In contrast, the African-American Hines, who despite the White Australia Policy managed to stay on in the country after arriving in 1970 to perform in the rock musical, Hair, was able to become successful in her musical career as a result of being “whitened” by the melodic pop song material she adopted. The two chapters on Britain focus on Helen Shapiro and Amy Winehouse. Stratton discusses Shapiro’s short career as a teenage pop star in the context of exclusionary definitions of Englishness, showing how her high celebrity visibility brought Jewish female stereotypes to the fore, while her contralto singing voice associated her, as a female performer, with African-American music. Other female singers of the period associated with black music, such as Dusty Springfield and Lulu, were likewise constructed as not-quite-white/not-quite-English. The similarities and differences between these sixties singers and Winehouse’s rise to prominence in the early 2000s are explored in the final chapter. Stratton analyses her relationship with blackness and black music, and compares her with Rachel Stevens, who makes mainstream white dance music.
The rest of the book consists of case studies of musical genres and specific performers in the United States. These are mainly set in the post-World War Two period. The first chapter is the exception, and there Stratton discusses Jewish torch song singers of the 1920s and 1930s. By this time Jews were not considered so much as black but rather as racially distinct and only marginally white. As the Jewish use of the blackface mask decreased, their adoption of “coon” shouting--involving vocal techniques for enhancing expressive intensity--increased during performances on the white vaudeville stage. In this way torch song singers like Fanny Brice and Libby Holman formed a bridge between African-American female blues singers and white audiences. Stratton then jumps to the late 1950s/early 1960s where he takes us on an excursion through Brill Building music, the ascendancy of which coincided with Jewish suburbanization and increasing acceptance into white American society. He argues that the desire for assimilation found expression in the Brill Building fantasies of romantic love, marriage, and homeliness. Subsequent Jewish disillusionment with suburbia in the face of continuing discrimination was then refracted through the teen angst songs of the Jewish girl group, the Shangri-Las, many of whose songs were written by Jewish Brill Building composers.
A mid-book chapter is devoted to the sixties relationship between Jews and blues music in the United States. Here the author extends his argument that adherence to electric blues music formed a way of expressing Jewish anomie. While some parts of this are persuasive, others are strained, with, for example, his treatment of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited being rather distorted by his racial analytical lens. Was this really Jewish blues? It seems much too exclusive a term. The chapter on blues is followed by consideration of the Beastie Boys’ mediation of rap for a white audience. As young Jewish men, the Beasties acted as a link across the musical divide between black and white audiences. Forging such links seems to have been a common function performed by Jews in various different settings and with reference to different musical genres. How this squares with the diverse social and cultural articulations of Jewishness remains a moot point, one never properly resolved in the book.
Overall, Stratton veers between insistence on the ideological constructedness of Jewishness and being analytically reliant on a residual essentialism which attributes to Jewish ethnic identity the operations they perform in music and society relations. This leads to further unresolved issues. Does Jewishness always prevail to the same extent in these relations; is it always a, if not the, key factor in accounting for musical quality, prowess, innovation, or distinctiveness; and in what ways is Jewishness valid as a category of experience and identity affecting musical involvement? Stratton leaves these questions hanging. The book is nevertheless an absorbing investigation into how the racialized positioning of Jews has affected the kinds of music in which they have been major participants, and at least in some ways helps to explain why Jewish people in different contexts have been affiliated--or have affiliated themselves--with African-American musical genres, idioms, and styles over and above all others that have emerged and developed in the modern world.
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[Review length: 1063 words • Review posted on February 6, 2012]