Two of the songs parody tunes from Porgy and Bess. They are “Summertime” and “There’s a Jaguar Leaving Soon for the Concord.”

The third Sherman song is, “You’re a Nudnick, Sondara Goldfarb.” It is a parody of “You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan,” from Carousel.

Thank you, Mark! (Not myself. Another Mark)

Thanks, guys.

Little David Susskind, shut up
Please don’t talk, please don’t talk
Little David Susskind, eat first
Then you’ll talk

David Susskind came to public fame in the late 1950s with the talk show Open End, which sometimes ran for hours. It had no predetermined time slot. It began at 11pm “and ran until the topics–or the participants–were exhausted.” An idea that makes me giggle with delight. The show was a manic talk-fest that was nicknamed Open Mouth.

Sherman’s friend Dick Gehman, known as The Factory for his tremendous writing output, in 1963 wrote that “until recently David Susskind was the least controversial personality in the television industry. Nearly everyone hated his guts.”

Love it.

But Sherman did something brilliant in that 1962 Susskind ditty that anticipated by 10 years Jewish social studies, the approach to studying Jewish history that allows a broader look at the Jewish experience by including in that experience people, events, and movements that are not explicitly or self-consciously Jewish.

Sherman took a look at Susskind and placed him within Jewish life, within Jewish culture, and identified him as a motormouth Jewish type that his audience instantly recognized. At its worst, this approach can deteriorate into a kind of Herzogian Reality Instructor approach that reduces individuals of great energy and talent and (why not?) madness to a common denominator low enough for anyone to reach.

But that’s not what Sherman does here. He shrewdly calls attention to something important that was overlooked by everyone.

Not surprisingly, the often married Rose Sherman and her criminal husband were not concerned about Jewish tradition. They were married by a Christian minister.

But some Jewish traditions die harder than others. Sherman went to school at John Burroughs Junior High School, which had a large Jewish student body. On September 24, 1936, at the time of the Rosh Hashana new year holiday, the student newspaper reported that 650 students, or 30 percent of the school, were absent the first day of the two-day religious holiday. Most returned to school on the second day. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know if Sherman was absent either day. Probably not.

Sherman’s family may not have lived as Jews, but they still lived among Jews. And it was this ethnic ingredient in Jewish identity that Sherman became famous for celebrating at precisely the moment in the early 1960s that Americans of various backgrounds began reclaiming their linguistic/national/culinary/folk traditions.

Well, that’s not right.

For my biography of Sherman I have done some prodigious digging, and as I gathered information I became embarrassed that I didn’t think more critically about Sherman’s claim. From kindergarden through 12th grade there are 13 years of schooling. To rack up 21 schools he’d have to had gone to a different school every year and to two schools in eight of those years.

Not likely.

But he did move around.

According to school records Allan Sherman, then known as Allan Copelon, began 4th grade in New York and finished it in Chicago.

He started 5th grade in Chicago and finished it in California.

Seems like he spent 6th grade in California.

But he went to 7th grade in Chicago.

At the end of 7th grade he moved back to California.

Getting all this?

And remember, this was in the 1930s. The Depression. No air travel.

Sherman was only 11 when he finished 7th grade. (I haven’t found out whether he started school very young or skipped a grade.) But apparently, his enjoyment of wordplay was already clear. On his Progress Report, under a category for Special Aptitudes, a teacher wrote Poetry.

More tomorrow on 8th grade and Sherman’s growing taste for fame.

That’s enough to make any kid feel that no one could put his pieces together again.

But how to explain Humpty Dumpty happily singing in Yiddish?

Well, by the time Sherman penned that ditty in 1938, he had spent a lot of time living with his Yiddish-speaking, immigrant maternal grandparents in Chicago. (His mama was busy looking for a new husband.) In his autobiography, Sherman even wrote vividly about his grandfather taking him to Chicago’s Division Street baths, which figure prominently in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. (The shvitz also makes an important appearance in Bellow’s Seize the Day and in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. And let’s not forget about Bruce Jay Friedman’s play, Steambath. The baths were an impressive Jewish environment for young American Jews.)

Now, Sherman’s mother was also a Yiddish-speaking immigrant. Rose arrived in America when she was four. But she wasn’t about to admit it. On all her marriage licenses she claimed she was born in the U.S. And though she always married Jewish men, the last time she got married she had a Christian minister perform the rites.

So Sherman kept moving back and forth between his unambiguously Jewish grandparents and his Jewish heritage-denying mother and her third and fourth husbands and intervening boyfriends.

After years of this life, Sherman at 13 seems to have decided that he may not have a permanent home address. He may not have a permanent father. He may not have a permanent last name (he went back and forth between Copelon and Sherman even in college). And he may not have a mother who knew who she was or wanted to be.

But he had Jewish grandparents who spoke Yiddish. They were exactly what they seemed to be. And that’s what he was going to be.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a train/Happily singing ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.’”

Was Allan Sherman a Humpty Dumpty?

Allan Sherman news? How can there be Allan Sherman news? The guy has been dead for almost 37 years.

There can be news because I’ve been researching his life for a biography, and I’ve interviewed dozens of his friends and family and obtained a great deal of original material and recordings from archives and individuals.

Incredibly, considering how many celebrities have been the subject of biographies, and how famous Sherman was and remains, my biography will be the first.

So to generate renewed interest in Sherman and discover others who enjoy him, I’m going to post Sherman news that I’ve uncovered.

And here it is, Sherman’s first Jewish parody.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a train/Happily singing ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.’”

These lines appeared in Sherman’s junior high school year book, in June 1938, when he was 13 years old.

What’s remarkable is how much of Sherman’s interests are already apparent. Here, Yiddish and singing are linked to happiness, and the parody of the Mother Goose rhyme anticipates his 1962 folk song parodies on My Son, The Folk Singer.

But why did Sherman come up with Humpty Dumpty as his stand-in? Well, Sherman was already roly-poly, and Humpty’s bulbous shape may account for the feeling of kinship.

But I think it was Humpty’s misfortune to be broken beyond repair that is the real connection to Sherman. His parents’ divorce when he was seven was part of that rupture. Just as painful, judging by the Jewish subject in his songs from the start, was the battle over his Jewish identity.

I’ll get to that in the next post.

Allan Sherman is my buttered yam

The sociologist Herbert J. Gans, recently retired from Columbia University, wrote one of the very few thoughtful articles about Allan Sherman.

In “Alan (sic) Sherman’s Sociologist Presents…,” published in The Reconstructionist on May 3, 1963, Gans was intrigued by the Broadway show tune parodies Sherman performed at concerts (copyright holders did not allow Sherman to record these parodies). Gans saw that “by attaching Jewish lyrics to currently popular songs, Sherman is saying that the popular culture is by and large a Jewish product, and that Jews can take some pride in it.”

This was basically the thesis of my article on Sherman, which took as its inspiration a wonderful line by Stephen Whitfield of Brandeis: the “American Jewish subculture looks drab in the light of an American culture that Jews have helped to energize.”

But here is where Gans nails the Sherman problem faced by the hip Jews under 40.

Sherman’s songs “are not satire, and they lack the biting political and social commentary that intellectuals call for.”

Ah, the problems faced by intellectuals.

Now those of us who grew up with Sherman formed our attachments before we could consider whether he was intellectually respectable. And I, at least — despite some intellectual pretensions — insist that my enjoyment of Sherman remain permissible.

My Sherman problem is like a problem faced by the hero of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man.

On a winter’s night in Harlem, the never-named Invisible Man buys a baked yam with melted butter from a street vendor. It brings back moving childhood memories and it is also delicious. But he realizes that relishing the baked yam is a low-class enjoyment that a young educated black man like him should not admit to liking.

“If only someone who had known me at school or at home would come along and see me now. How shocked they’d be!”

But moments later he thinks, “to hell with being ashamed of what you liked. No more of that for me.”

Not for me either.

Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh,
Here I am at Camp Granada.
Camp is very entertaining,
And they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining.

I went hiking with Joe Spivey.
He developed poison ivy.
You remember Leonard Skinner.
He got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner.

All the counselors hate the waiters,
And the lake has alligators.
And the head coach wants no sissies,
So he reads to us from something called Ulysses.

Now I don’t want this should scare ya,
But my bunk mate has malaria.
You remember Jeffrey Hardy.
They’re about to organize a searching party.

Take me home, oh Muddah, Fadduh,
Take me home, I hate Granada,
Don’t leave me out here in the forest, where
I might get eaten by a bear.

Take me home, I promise I will not make noise,
Or mess the house with other boys.
Oh please don’t make me stay,
I’ve been here one whole day.

Dearest Fadduh, darling Muddah,
How’s my precious little Bruddah?
Let me come home if you miss me.
I would even let Aunt Bertha hug and kiss me.

Wait a minute, it stopped hailing.
Guys are swimming, guys are sailing.
Playing baseball, gee that’s better.
Muddah, Fadduh, kindly disregard this letter!