Rhythm and blues: How Jews promoted and popularized Black music

Jews have long been at the heart of America’s music business, from the early Tin Pan Alley days to the rise of indie labels specializing in rhythm and blues.

They were — and are — business people, composers and top-notch performers working with music genres connected to African American culture, from jazz to rock and roll, according to Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies Jonathan Karp.

“Jews were extremely prominent as interpreters of Black music, as musicians themselves but also as entrepreneurs of Black music,” he said.

Currently, Karp is working on a new book that explores Black and Jewish relations through the lens of popular music and the music business. His research often focuses on the complex interaction of the Jewish community with other communities that surround them, including the roles played by Jews in modern economic life and the images and stereotypes that have accompanied them.

“Jews are a minority and a diasporic people and, throughout their history, they have had to contend with being a small people, usually disliked and in a hostile environment,” Karp said. “You can only understand their history by understanding how they navigated and negotiated relationships with other surrounding groups.”

In Europe, that historically meant a Christian host society with different social classes. The modern United States is a far different environment: comprised of immigrants and multiple minorities, mainly Christian, but from all around the globe. These groups are engaged in similar struggles for survival and toleration, looking for economic niches to fill while competing and occasionally building alliances with one another, he said.

Beyond Whiteness

The author of The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848, Karp has also edited multiple volumes on a wide range of topics, most recently Beyond Whiteness: Revisiting Jews in Ethnic America, released last December. The title plays off a well-known book, Beyond Ethnicity, by literary scholar Werner Sollors, that explores how America gave individuals the opportunity to forge a different identity from the one they inherited, he explained.

The past 25 to 30 years have seen the development of Whiteness Studies, which holds that race — a binary, hierarchical division between White and Black — is more important than ethnicity in America. All European immigrant groups, from the Italians and Irish to the Germans, Jews and Poles, strove to attain status as White, the ultimate litmus test of social belonging.

“While I recognize that there’s a lot of truth to this approach and it has great value, I think it’s been taken too far,” Karp said. “My purpose in titling the book Beyond Whiteness is to say we have forgotten the degree to which ethnicity persists as a category, as a consciousness, many generations past the immigrant generation.”

It’s also difficult to subsume non-European immigrant groups, such as Asians and Latinos, into the Black-White binary, he pointed out.

In Beyond Whiteness, Karp contributed a chapter that compared Asian Americans and American Jews. The two groups have many parallels as “model minorities” that achieved rapid upward social mobility and high rates of education. You can consider them “over-represented minorities” in that their prominence in education and the economy is significantly higher than their proportion of the U.S. population; Jews comprise only 2% of Americans and Asians less than 10%, he said.

“People are uncomfortable with over-representation; they don’t have the language to talk about it,” Karp said.

The music business

The relationship between the Black and Jewish communities in the music business is complex, curious and conflicted.

Before records became popular and available, sheet music was the main way that popular tunes moved through the market. Jews were prominent in Tin Pan Alley, the sheet music publishing industry; by the early 1900s, they had a substantial plurality of music publishing businesses in New York City, the capital of sheet music publishing.

Jewish songwriters also achieved prominence early in the 20th century, including in genres inspired by Black styles, such as ragtime; they included Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, and Rogers and Hammerstein, as well as many lesser-known figures, Karp said.

In the 1940s, Jews became important in the proliferation of small, independent record labels that specialized in rhythm and blues, a genre made and most often sold to African Americans migrating from the rural South to northern cities after the Second World War. Eventually, White youth began buying and listening to these records, too, which marked the advent of rock and roll.

It’s not that African Americans weren’t creating the business infrastructure or capitalizing on a commodity that they themselves mainly produced, Karp cautions. Black record labels and sheet music publishers date back to the 1920s, but they faced significant obstacles because of racism. Lacking the stigma of Blackness, Jews could step in as intermediaries in the business world; their willingness to do so points to their difference from other White ethnic groups.

Jews weren’t just the business minds, although their role in the industry’s business infrastructure likely came first. Once again, they also excelled as songwriters and musicians working in a commercial, R&B style, including such 1960s greats as Cynthia Weil, Carol King and Gerry Goffin.

Fewer Jewish songwriters and musicians went on to create hip hop and rap, the next phase of Black music, but Jews remain important in independent labels such as Tommy Boy Records, Def Jam Records and more.

“Sometimes, these are the nieces and nephews and grandchildren of the people who created the rhythm and blues indie labels of the 1940s and 1950s,” Karp said. “The popular music business is in some ways a Jewish economic niche industry.”

Outside of the music business, however, the Black and Jewish communities experienced conflict. The disconnect comes down to social class, Karp explained.

Jews weren’t direct competitors with the Black community in the same way as working-class Italians and Irish, for example. Even in Europe, Jews tended to have middle- or lower-middle-class origins, although they were knocked down the social ladder as a result of discrimination. After a brief sojourn in the working class, often working in the garment industry, Jews moved into small businesses and the professions by the 1920s, while Black Americans were prevented from rising due to systemic bias.

The difference in social class enabled the two groups to collaborate in the music industry, but also sparked tensions because Jews were often the landlords and shopkeepers in Black neighborhoods in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s.

“The kind that tensions that exist are Christian versus Jewish on one hand, Black versus White on the other hand and, if we have a third hand, customer versus merchant, tenant versus landlord or employee versus employer,” Karp reflected. “That’s a pretty potent brew of tensions: religious, racial and economic.”