People Sing! Sam Liptzin, Paul Robeson, and the Voices of the Folk
*This paper was presented as a conference talk at the Association for Jewish Studies 2020 virtual conference, December 13, 2020*
Zeke Levine
“Are you an American? Am I an American? I'm just an Irish, Jewish, Italian, French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, Swedish, Finnish, Greek and Turk and Czech” from Ballad for Americans.
“In every town and hamlet, I, the ‘alien’ have built factories, homes, warehouses, mansions, yea, even the very fences that check me on my road—that stop me , the sower, the producer—even these walls I have built with my own hands.” From Sam Liptzin “I am an American!”
While you take a look at these passages, I want to thank the AJS conference organizers for making this year’s virtual meeting happen. I’d also like to thank my co-panelists Miriam and Diana for their fantastic work, and Kalman Weiser, for chairing the panel.
The Yiddish phrase “dos folk,” can be translated several ways, simultaneously signifying “folk,” “nation,” “ethnic group,” and “people.” This array of meanings complicates the notion of “folk music,” particularly in the American context, in which the term “folk” stands in for competing definitions of “American.” In this paper, I suggest that attending to the multi-valence of the Yiddish term “dos folk” provides a lens for investigating the role that folk music, both Yiddish and American, has played in the complicated legacy of claims to national belonging in the United States.
I put a close reading of Yiddish writer Sam Liptzin’s Zingen mir series of songbooks in conversation with Michael Denning and Lisa Barg’s analyses of Paul Robeson’s 1938 performance of Ballad For Americans, an iconic musical work that made an inclusive claim to American belonging. In connecting these two works, I endeavor to un-pack the circulation of political ideas and culture under the rubric of “folk music,” or to evoke the ambiguity of the Yiddish: “folk muzik.”
Self-proclaimed “Radical humorist” Sam Liptzin is, today, not a household name. But from 1920 to 1972, his twenty-eight volumes of short stories, poems, and aphorisms, as well as four songbooks, were widely circulated and praised. Born in Lipsk—in today’s Belarus—in 1893, Liptzin migrated to the United States in 1909 and quickly became involved in radical Yiddish circles, penning articles and stories for the Communist Morgn Frayhayt, while also working in the garment industry. His many volumes humorously portray the everyday lives of leftist Yiddish speakers in New York, deftly incorporating English speech into his Yiddish writing, drawing attention to the mid-twentieth century American setting of his stories.
Before exploring the Zingen mir series, I’d like to highlight some praise that Liptzin’s writing received over the decades. For example, Moyshe Olgin, the first editor of the Frayhayt notes “Sam Liptzin is one of the most loved folk storytellers and entertainers on the proletarian front,” identifying that “Sam Liptzin has put forward his own genre through his writings.” Paul Novick, another Frayhayt editor calls Liptzin a “true folkshrayber” praising Liptzin for “not los[ing] contact with the times.” The noted Yiddish Communist writer Chaver Paver identifies in Liptzin “the talent of a folks-speaker. In order to speak for the folk, one must have warmth and love for the people.” Samuel Sillen, a writer for the English language Daily Worker, claims “Liptzin is a folk writer. He deals with everyday themes in a warm, human way.” I would like to draw attention to the characterization of Liptzin as a “folk writer,” zooming into the word “folk.” How do we understand this term? I’d like to hold onto the valence of “folk” in this context, especially as we move to discussing American folk music.
In 1954, Liptzin published Zingen mir, a follow-up to a 1949 song compilation. The 1954 Zingen mir is, however, distinguished by its multilingualism. Like the 1949 publication, this songbook contains mostly Yiddish folk and resistance songs, such as “zog nit keynmol,” “unter a kleyn beymele,” and “ale brider,” as well as Liptzin’s Yiddish re-textualizations of such songs as “Solidarity Forever,” “Az men fort kayn sevastopol” and “Ikh bin a border bay mayn vayb.” Notably, the compilation also includes eight American songs that are presented in English, not Yiddish. While the staple union anthem “Solidarity Forever” and “The Star Spangled Banner” are included in the songbook, I want to draw our attention to six selections that, notably, were popularized by singer Paul Robeson. “Go Down Moses,” “The House I Live In,” “The Peatbog Soldiers,” “United Nations,” “From Border Unto Border” and “Which Side Are You On,” all reference Robeson’s repertoire.
I’d also like to pause on Liptzin’s non-literal English translation of the title Zingen mir: “Peoples Sing.” The significance of the word “People” is drawn out in Michael Denning’s discussion of the culture of the Popular Front, and specifically Paul Robeson’s 1938 performance of Ballad for Americans, composed by Earl Robinson. As Michael Denning explains, “‘The People’ became the central trope of left culture in this period, the imagined ground of political and cultural activity,” continuing, “The question of ‘representing’ the people—to depict and speak for the people—lies at the center of the artistic and intellectual works of the cultural front” (Denning 124). Paul Robeson’s importance to mid-twentieth century music and politics cannot be overstated, as Shana Redmond’s recently published, innovative monograph attests. Throughout his career, Robeson spoke to and about workers and made passionate appeals for civil rights—his powerful, operatically trained baritone a resonating voice for mid-twentieth century progressive politics. Michael Denning evokes Ballad for Americans as an example of the culture of the Popular Front, and particularly its relationship to ideas of “American” and “Folk.” Denning identifies that “The figure of ‘America’ became a locus for ideological battles over the trajectory of U.S. history, the meaning of race, ethnicity, and region in the United States, and the relation between ethnic nationalism, Americanism, and internationalism” (Denning 129). “Indeed, Paul Robeson’s concerts were, for his audiences, an embodiment of this Popular Front vision. By singing songs from around the world, he created a symbolic federation of national folk musics anchored in the African American spiritual” (Denning, 132). We hear this message in the closing lyrics of Ballad for Americans: “Deep as our valleys, High as our mountains, Strong as the people who made it. For I have always believed it, and I believe it now, And now you know who I am. Who are you? America! America!” Note that in Denning’s formulation, “folk music” is framed in terms of “the people,” connecting folk musical traditions with the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, anti-fascist Popular Front coalition.
Lisa Barg draws on Denning’s analysis but emphasizes Ballad for Americans within the trajectory of American folklore studies of the twentieth century. Barg explains, “The Popular Front period witnessed a significant reconceptualization in critical debates about what and who constituted the “folk” (Barg, 34). She continues, “The varied aesthetic-political alliances in Popular Front musical life were nowhere more evident than in the diversity of forms produced under the category of folk, from the collecting of field recordings and the publication of folk song anthologies, to the creation of a multitude of popular modernist works in the arena of musical theater, film, and concert music” (Barg, 36). Like Denning, Barg connects “folk” with the Popular Front language of “The People”: “What all these various uses of the term “people’s music” shared was a bid to represent the nation’s vernacular,” noting the “government supported efforts of Charles Seeger and Alan Lomax to inculcate “authentic” American folk consciousness in the “people” (Barg 52).
I highlight Barg’s analysis for two reasons. First, her repeated use of the term “folk” and “people” in the context of song demonstrates music as a domain well suited to considering cultural, political, and aesthetic convergences in the Popular Front era. For example, she notes that another Earl Robinson composition “Death House Blues”—published in the 2nd Workers Songbook compiled by the New York Composers’ Collective-- “signaled the reconceptualization of folk song and American vernacular music as “people’s music.” It also registers the mediating role of race in general and the centrality of blackness in many visions of “people’s music” and “people’s culture” in the Popular Front social movement” (Barg, 35).
Crucially, her musicological approach draws particular attention to Robeson’s voice. While we have been attending to the semantic breakdown of the term “folk,” we benefit additionally from a focus on Robeson’s resonant baritone. Barg explains “The ideological conflict in Ballad for Americans between accommodation and protest, national affirmation and critique, the realities of racial and ethnic divides, and the promise of national inclusiveness indexed troubling contradictions of race and nation—ones that coalesced around the materiality of Robeson’s voice” (Barg 65).
While there isn’t time to give a thorough treatment of the presentation of African American characters in Yiddish American literature, I acknowledge that it is not un-problematic, to say the very least. Nevertheless, evoking Paul Robeson’s voice was crucial to demonstrating a progressive stance in American politics for left-wing Yiddishists. I offer but one example from Sam Liptzin that illuminates this point. In Liptzin’s 1954 poem “Black History,” he claims “Wall Street speaks of World Democracy, but Paul Robeson, the black man, cannot open his mouth.” We hear Paul Robeson’s voice as point of coalescence for a mid-twentieth century progressive stance in both the Yiddish and larger American spheres, that was anti-fascist, pro-union, and deeply committed to the Civil Rights Movement.
As Lisa Barg’s article suggests, these connections around the words “folk” and “people” are significant in light of the twentieth century American folk movement. If scholars such as Karl Hagstrom Miller identify folk music in the United States as that musical tradition of people imaged to be “isolated” by folklorists, then the circulation and network of musical ideas in the mid-twentieth century require a new conception of “folk music.” Miller explains, “Folklore located authenticity in isolation from modern life and modern media” (Miller, 6), “they suggest that continuities within these traditions are more significant than transformations, the origins of a style more revelatory than the changing ways in which a variety of people have used it” (Miller, 7), and that “these concepts of isolation grew out of previous debates about the relationship among language, history, and race” (Miller, 89). Robeson and Liptzin provide interconnected models that help to counter this isolationist model and highlight American folk music as a politically engaged cultural movement predicated on networks of individuals, groups, and languages that all fall under the rubric of “American.”
Specifically, Sam Liptzin’s Zingen mir series demonstrates the possibility of ethnic and linguistic particularity as consistent with the idea of “American folk.” Reading Zingen mir through Ballad for Americans allows us to rethink the “American folk tradition.” As Jeffrey Shandler, Josh Kun, Karen Brodkin Sacks, and many other scholars have demonstrated, the post-war period marked a significant acculturation of American Jews into mainstream American culture. Countering a retreat to cultural conformity, Zingen mir and Ballad for Americans demonstrate an inclusive vision of American belonging based in the evolving boundaries of American folk music during the mid-twentieth century.
This offers a lens for understanding the trajectory of folk music into the 1960s. For example, Bob Dylan’s supposedly heretical “electric” performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival aligns more closely with this inclusive model, whose boundaries are permeable and constantly shifting. More significantly, it counters a model of “American” based on exclusion promoted during the McCarthy period, and which reverberates rather concerningly in the MAGA era. Ballad For Americans and Zingen mir invite us to hear an ever-expanding chorus of American voices as the sound of the folk.
Barg, Lisa. “Paul Robeson’s Ballad for Americans: Race and the Cultural Politics of ‘People’s Music.’” Journal for American Music 2, No. 1. (2008) p 27-70.
Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Verso Books, 2011)
Liptzin, Sam. Zingen Mir, (New York: Amcho Publisher, 1954)
Miller, Karl Hagstrom Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow.( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)