The September 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly is out. Let’s see what’s listed for sale. Hey, this looks interesting: “A dandy new cowboy song with Western effects galore. Among them — the tom tom, cowboy chorus, cowboy and Indian yells, hoof beats, etc.” The ad also says that the vocalist “sings this number with the spirit and fire that the unusual words and music call for — so plainly too that not a word is lost, even in the yiddish dialect portion.” Let’s have a listen:
“I’m a Yiddish Cowboy” was performed by Edward Meeker (who had also sung the first recorded version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”). The composers were Al Piantadosi and Halsey Mohr. Of primary interest, however, is the overall theme as reflected in the lyrics of Edgar Leslie. What was funny about Jewish cowboys? And what about this one was viewed as Jewish in the first place? His Yiddish vocabulary appears to be limited to a single word — “oi” — and, while he insists on sending for a rabbi to preside at his wedding, the bride is Native American. Perhaps the key is his status as an upstart — brashly courting a “blue blood [sic] Indian maiden” and crassly refusing the offer of a peace pipe in favor of cigarettes. What chutzpah! Yet as a manly creature of the frontier, he appeared positioned to counter some negative stereotypes.
That promise was squandered in a follow-up song in which our protagonist, Tough Guy Levi, makes a guest appearance. Al Piantadosi again supplied the score, but this time the words were by Jeff T. Branen. As far as I can tell, no recording has survived, but the cover for the sheet music shows a caricature of a man with a black beard and huge nasal appendage in an Indian headdress. The lyrics state in part:
Cohen got tired of the simple life
And turned his pawnshop over to his wife….
[O]whoopska, owhoopska
Big Chief Dynamite, oi, oi,
I’m a tough Jew-Indian boy,
Who’s afraid of the western life?
What care I for the cowboy’s knife?
Tough Guy Levi and his bunch,
I will eat them for my lunch….
Spoiler alert — he’s Big Chief Dynamite because he blows up Tough Guy Levi in the second stanza.
Another specimen from the sheet music collections is almost as offensive. The chorus of a song from 1907 went:
Western life is fine and dandy. I have got no kick.
When I think of the pawn-shop bus’ness, oi, it makes me sick.
Ev’ry time I see some Indians, I just kill a few.
So I’ve changed my name from Finkelstein to Yonkel, the cow-boy Jew.
So what’s going on here? Some historical perspective may be helpful.
In such doggerel, one can find a grotesquely distorted echo of bygone days. The Wild West was at least somewhat more Jewish than commonly assumed. While most Jewish immigrants congregated in the ghettos of large Eastern cities, some headed to the frontier in the search of opportunity. By 1878, over twenty thousand Jews lived in the Western states and territories. Among them was a genuine “tough guy” — Jim Levy (1842-1882), who took part in approximately sixteen shootouts and whose skills were praised by the legendary Wyatt Earp (who himself married a Jewish woman and is buried in a Jewish cemetery). There was also the equivalent of a Jewish Indian Chief — Solomon Bibo (1853-1934), who married a woman of the Acoma tribe in New Mexico and was elected tribal leader. And Yonkel Levatansky (1827-1919), a Civil War veteran who settled in Texas, was known for his cowboy boots and “Russian-Texas drawl.”
The Jewish cowboy songs also reflected their own time — an era when ethnic humor flourished. The most notorious examples of that humor were directed at African-Americans. Indeed, Branen, the author of “Big Chief Dynamite” was a former lawyer (a least according to a 1911 Billboard profile) who specialized in writing “Blackface Farces”; true to form, he died in 1927 in Helena, Montana while staging a minstrel show. But on Tin Pan Alley, other minorities were also fair game. An entire genre of “Jewface” songs emerged which were sometimes performed on stage by Jewish entertainers. They included such curiosities as “Under the Matzos Tree” (“Let’s mingle/Jingle, jingle”) and “When Mose With His Nose Led the Band,” a portion of which Irving Berlin is said to have lifted and incorporated into the score of “God Bless America.”
Times changed. By the second half of the 20th century, both the Jews of the Old West and the Jewface world were long forgotten. The kosher cowboy, however, occasionally resurfaced as an object of mirth with Jewish writers now firmly in control. Mickey Katz, the father of Broadway’s Joel Gray, parodied the 1955 hit, “The Ballad of Davey Crockett,” in “Duvid Crockett.” (“Born in the wilds of Delancey Street./Home of gefilte fish and kosher meat….”). And in a classic of its kind, a top 1964 Country & Western song was reimagined as follows:
And so the Jewish cowboy evolved into an oxymoron — or at least a figure who drew laughs by being cast against type. As such, he provides a way for those of us who are hopelessly urban and gun shy to laugh at ourselves.
I wonder if Mel Brooks was familiar with this genre when he wrote Blazing Saddles
Were any of these composers/lyricists actually Jewish? I can’t seem to find much bio material on them.
Interesting observation. As best I have been able to determine, the only person named in this piece who seems to have been Jewish was Mickey Katz.