Jean Shepherd singing Bear Missed the Train
You know you hear a poem or song for the first time, and then it turns up everywhere? This week that song for me has been "Bei mir bist Du schoen" / "The Bear Missed his Train". B2s Dixieland group played the second version at their jam session last Saturday, and I thought it was a cute, catchy number...my son had to explain to me that it was a parody of a 'real' song. (Parody apparently written in the early 60s by the Smith Street Society Jazz Band.) Then this week Patty Andrews died, and NPR picked "Bei mir bist Du schoen" as the song to remember her by. NPR calls the Andrews Sisters success with the song an "only in America tale", because the song was a hit in Yiddish theatre, and was sung at the Apollo by two black recording artists (identified in the NPR story as "Johnny and George"), before it made it to mainstream fame with the Andrews Sisters.
And now played and sung with gusto by five teenage boys in the foyer of the High School Winter Formal venue Saturday night.
The Bear version calls to mind the edifying (if slightly twee) children's book by D. B. Johnson much loved by Unitarian Universalist Families: Henry Hikes to Fitchburg".
And while we're on the subject of entertainment, it is eerie how much the local high school principal, Tom Butler resembles Dean Martin ?
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Bei mir bist Du schoen was one of hose songs that occupied my skull like a flesh-eating virus when I was a child. Perhaps I would have liked it better had I known that it was Yiddish theatre--a topic of which then I knew nothing, or as they say in Yiddish theatre, bupkas.
I also rode the Manchester-Fitchburg bus, but only as far as Bedford. Cost 15 cents.
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