Great Jewish Songs: An Overview

This is an overview of our comments on great Jewish songs and lyrics some of which belong to the romantic repertoire of Jewish standards. For quite some songs lots of people know that the author/s was/were/is/are Jews but there are also quite some were not that many human beings we know, know that they have deep roots in Jewish Culture.

As can be easily glimpsed from the selection we are great fans of songs that Jews wrote for or that have been taken up by African-American artists (formerly called either black or negro singers). Also, in the youth of quite a few of our illustrious editorial staff Viennese Jewish Music played a hard to overestimate role.

As to the languages, many of these are in English, some are in German, and even the oddball Yiddish example can be heard and understood if one really wants to. Up till now there's one in French and one in Hebrew. Ladino songs are to follow but have not yet made it into these pages.

Due to the inner nature of blogging software, articles get posted nicely for daily reading and not so nicely for leisurely sunday afternoon archive browsing. So here's a little implement to make it easier for the p.t. audience to re-read and re-hear.

Thanks to the large GOOG-financed public casting system most of the time we can also offer awesome original interpretations ripped from old video tape and shellac or vinyl records. Many of these copies are probably barely legal. Welcome everybody to the joys of postmodern triple media. Cute they are, are they not?

• Pollution, Pollution
• Frühlingsmärchen
• Cry-Baby, Cry Till We Cry
• Losing The Rotten Yoke
• Revisit The Ole Dixie
• Just A Tiny Prayer
• Gloomy Sunday, Gloomy Monday
• Trauriger Sonntag, trauriger Montag N° 2
• Khotsh A Rege Tunkl Gold
• A Stroll To Caeserea
• Obsolete Berufe und lustige Österreicher
• Can You Hear Me, Dr. Wu?
• 3 Younglings In A Fiery Furnace
• On The Cover Of A Magazine
• We Have Ways Of Making You Dance
• Trop Tard Vraiement
• Trop Tard Maintenant
• No Reason To Live
• Divorcing Carribean Style
• Wie ein Hauch, der im All balanciert
• Solution to the Question why God Created Movies
• Pastoral Scenes Of The Ole Dixie
• Herr von Braun is learning Chinese
• Lie Beside Me Baby, That's An Order
• Go on and love me, I don't care
• Strings And Pearls

Pollution, Pollution

Autor: Tom Lehrer Künstler: Tom Lehrer Album: That Was The Year That Was Song: Pollution

This is the second installment on Tom Lehrer and rightly so because along with Shel Silverstein and with more hilarious ones to his credit he is one of the funniest Jewish English language poets and a brilliant cabaret piano player on top of that.

That Was the Year That Was is a 1965 live album recorded at the hungry i in San Francisco, containing performances by Tom Lehrer of topical songs he had written for the NBC television series with that name, known informally as TW3. All of the album's songs are related to items in the news of 1964 and 1965. Some things like pollution take long to have effects in nature and also long to become known to all of society in the remote provinces of the empire.

What climate change is today pollution was in the 60ies and 70ies. While its easily perceivable effects in Western cities have largely been elimintated by national states and international contracts and projects, its long term and far away effects still wreak a lot of havoc in large waters and air. That is also how we can connect this song to today's Swedish girls' activities.

If you visit American city, You will find it very pretty. Just two things of which you must beware: Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!

Pollution, pollution! They got smog and sewage and mud. Turn on your tap And get hot and cold running crud!

See the halibuts and the sturgeons Being wiped out by detergents. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, But they don’t last long if they try.

Pollution, pollution! You can use the latest toothpaste, And then rinse your mouth With industrial waste.

Just go out for a breath of air And you’ll be ready for Medicare. The city streets are really quite a thrill – If the hoods don’t get you, the monoxide will.

Pollution, pollution! Wear a gas mask and a veil. Then you can breathe, Long as you don’t inhale!

Lots of things there that you can drink, But stay away from the kitchen sink! Throw out your breakfast garbage

And I’ve got a hunch…

that the folks downstream

will drink it for lunch!

So go to the city, See the crazy people there. Like lambs to the slaughter, They’re drinking the water And breathing [cough] the air!