Song

The famous poem that sits at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “The New Colossus”, was written specifically for that massive sculpture and referred to Lady Liberty as the “mother of exiles”. The poem, by Emma Lazarus, speaks of the “wretched refuse from the teeming shores” as that collection of souls whom the great lady’s torch was meant to guide to America, preferring it over the “ancient lands” and “storied pomp” of the Old World of Europe.

It seems Lazarus knew that the folks at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder would bring the greatest vitality and creativity to her young country. Indeed, Lazarus lived in New York in the late 1800s and was active in welcoming Jewish refugees escaping genocide in Eastern Europe. It is to these people in particular that American popular song owes so much.

Nearly everything that makes America’s music exceptional came from those “homeless, tempest-tost” who arrived with no chance or inclination of ever going back if things didn’t work out in their newly adopted homeland. Terrible circumstances beyond their control had uprooted them and brought them to these strange shores. That made for some very intense and conflicted emotions: desperate to make it work in the New World, but also longing for what was familiar and comfortable in the place they’d been forced to leave.

From that cauldron of emotional turmoil – not overlooking the millions of enslaved peoples who are also a critical part of America’s formation – rose some of the most remarkable music on the planet: ragtime, blues, jazz, Broadway, R&B, soul, gospel, hip-hop, country and western, rock ‘n’ roll, and all of them stewed into an amalgam known as “American pop”.

It is one thing to be down on your luck and in need of starting over, but it’s quite another to be on the run for your life. While it’s true that many immigrants got off the boat seeking greener pastures, others disembarked on American soil with a gun to their head or simply because it was their last and only stop to escape annihilation. The latter circumstances tend to take the immigrant spirit to a whole other level; survival was at the forefront of their experience, and this imbued their toils and creativity in their adopted country with great soul and earnestness.

My great-grandfather, an Armenian, escaped genocide at the hands of the Turks by the skin of his teeth, tumbling out of steerage onto the docks of New York harbor in the late 1800s with nearly nothing to his name and no way to communicate with those around him. The Methodists offered to clothe and teach him, but only if he was willing to attend their seminary. Before he knew it, he was a member of their clergy, founding a church in Salem, Oregon. Perhaps not his first choice as an Armenian to spread the gospel in the Willamette Valley, but he did so with zeal for the rest of his life.

That’s what life or death choices bring out in people: zeal and lots of it. That’s the secret sauce that American immigrants have been bringing to the table from even before the nation was founded, and it is reflected in much of the music that emerged as a result.

If it is true that the immigrants most miserable and afflicted upon arrival offered the most creative energy to America’s wellspring of popular song, then this is especially so for the African/Caribbean slave populations. Despite their abduction to North America and all the myriad traumas of enslavement, they have had a rich impact on nearly every aspect of American creative expression, and that influence for the better has never let up.

To mark this cultural gift his people were so inclined to bestow to the US, jazz great Duke Ellington posited ironically in a speech he gave in 1941, “I contend that the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creative America, and it was a happy day in America when the first unhappy slave was landed on its shores.” (Dumain)

Not to minimize the magnificent contribution made by this earliest immigrant wave, there are two other groups of subsequent arrivals who also had a significant impact on American music and perhaps don’t always get the credit they deserve: the Scots-Irish and their offerings to American folk and country music, and the Russian Jews. Here, we focus on celebrating the latter group and their particular contribution to the birth of American pop music.

The Russian Jewish Diaspora and the Birth of American Pop

“In the twentieth century, America would remake the world, the whole world, and popular music would remake America.” – Sidran There Was a Fire

It was named the “American Century” because of the indelible cultural stamp the nation put on the 1900s. The notion of popular music as such had existed for as long as a particular piece of music could be repeated and handed down to an appreciative audience, which is to say, for time immemorial. However, the terms “pop music” or “hit songs” connotes a purely American phenomenon which had its beginnings around the turn of the 20th century, when technology and copyright laws permitted music for the first time to be profitably mass-produced and marketed.

The production of consumer goods was beginning to hit its stride, and so too was the notion of music as a mass commodity to be promoted relentlessly to the buying public, originally through piano sheet music and live performances, and later by way of recordings and radio. Something that had been around for a long time – the appreciation of music – was for the first time being “streamlined and intensified by the industrialization of culture,” and it was happening for the most part in America. (Stanley)

At the same time, a wave of Jewish immigrants was arriving from Russia, and their abrupt influx was at the vanguard of this critical shift in American character, taste, and creativity. They were not only in the right place at the right time to bring about this transformation, but they were also naturally driven to do so.

Irving Berlin (1888 – 1989) was arguably America’s first pop music superstar, and his earliest memory was as a child watching the Cossacks burn his village in Russia. Born Israel Beilin, his family escaped to the US when he was five years old, and he would become one of the nation’s most prolific and influential early songwriters at a time when the Great American Songbook’s first chapters were written.