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.
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