Andrew Whitehead

 

'Cohen the Crooner, the Crosby from Mile End'

07/01/2012

2 Comments

 
What a remarkable film clip! This is Max Bacon - a radio and music hall comedian - performing 'Cohen the Crooner, the Crosby from Mile End' in a 1936 movie: 'Soft Lights and Sweet Music'. Part of it was filmed on location at Mile End market.

I owe this to Alan Dein. He's just bought a 78 rpm copy of this number at his local charity shop. And scouring around the internet to find out more, he came across the wonderful YouTube clip posted above.


As you can see, the sleeve of the disc Alan bought (thanks Alan for screening it and sending the image on) shows that it originally came from a shop in - yes - Mile End!

Picture
_There's a brief biography of Max Bacon here. He was a drummer with the renowned Ambrose orchestra, and did occasional comedy songs, before later going into variety and making radio appearances.

He is on the left on the accompanying photo of two Jewish comedians - an image I came across on a site I warmly recommend, run by Phil Walker and devoted to the Jewish East End http://www.jewisheastend.com/london.html
_Doing my own digging about the song and the singer, I found another YouTube clip - which said it was Adele performing 'Cohen the Crooner'. Really?!!! Well, yes and no - not that Adele, but worth watching all the same:

__
And the lyrics of the song, courtesy of mudcat ... all together now!

As I push my barrow along
You'll hear me sing the latest song
I'm Cohen the crooner
The Crosby from Mile End.

I sell peanuts penny a bag
To the tune of Tiger Rag
I'm Cohen the crooner
The Crosby from Mile End.

I sing jazz or [h]opera
My customers to suit,
But I don't give a hoot
So long I sell my fruit.

Radio singers may be swell
But they can't sell you fruits as well
Like Cohen the crooner
The Crosby from Mile End.
 


Comments

David
07/01/2012 11:55pm

Max Bacon, Issy Bonn, Bud Flanagan and many more....there's a great book in those jewish east end music hall stars with their shape-changing comedy routines full of parody, playing on class and ethnicity, and mash-ups of different languages. Fascinating. Needs a good oral historian with time on their hands to get to the anecdotes though. American cultural historians take this sort of stuff seriously; I've never understood why the same isn't true in Britain.

Incidentally I suspect that satire and parody really took off in Ashkenazi Jewish culture with the culture wars of the enlightenment. It's abundantly present in religious circles, radical politics (Jewish socialists and anarchists loved to riff on the enslavement / emancipatory themes of the Passover service) and was hugely popular in the Yiddish theatre world. Harry Ariel, the last playwright of the Yiddish theatre in London, wrote several parodies each season on popular hits of the day, which he would insert in the most incongruous way possible, eg an elderly East End immigrant couple would be reminiscing on stage when the orchestra would strike up and they would burst into a Yiddish/English version of 'Walking My Baby Back Home'.

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David
08/01/2012 6:29pm

A couple more thoughts about this remarkable period piece:

Bacon nods to the dialect comedians of an earlier generation with his use of Yiddish and Yiddishisms: he says 'fin Mile End' rather than 'from', 'mayn customers' not 'my' and 'as vell' rather than 'as well'. A linguist could write a whole paper about what's going on here, but what we have in these three examples are, respectively, a corruption of a Yiddish word, a Yiddish word used alongside an English one, and an English word with a Yiddish inflection.

Also, the conceit of 'Crosby from Mile End' stands in a tradition with a rich pedigree in the East End. Many of the most popular Yiddish actors had such labels attached to them. Jacob Adler was 'the Henry Irving of the Yiddish stage', comedian Maurice Axelrad was known in Whitechapel around 1900 as the 'Yiddish Dan Leno' and entertainer Leo Fuchs was billed in London in the 1940s as the 'Yiddish Danny Kaye' - all hinting at the status these artists had attained within their own milieu and carrying the suggestion that, but for a trick of fate/history/birth, they would have gone on to even greater success.

A final thought: it would be interesting to know if it's the Ambrose orchestra playing here; there are some seriously good musicians accompanying Bacon on this track.

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