Chosen Cowboy Mazl Tov: Tin Pan Alley and the Wild West Cowboy Jew

Abstract

Chosen Cowboy Mazl Tov:Tin Pan Alley and the Wild West Cowboy Jew Aaron Manela (bio) Edward Marks, the oft-quoted Tin Pan Alley publisher and author of the entertainment chronicle They All Sang, credits “Yiddle on Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime” in 1909 with beginning the “‘Yid’ Song” craze.1 The historical record, on the other hand, shows that two other songs preceded “Yiddle.” In 1907, Will Rossiter in Chicago published “Yonkle the Cow-Boy Jew,” and in 1908 Ted S. Barron in New York published “I’m a Yiddish Cowboy (Tough Guy Levi).”2 In 1909 Rossiter also published “Big Chief Dynamite” as an answer to “I’m a Yiddish Cowboy (Tough Guy Levi).”3 In this essay I demonstrate not only that the “‘Yid’ Song” gained popularity two years earlier than Marks claimed, but also that the comic Cowboy Jew character quickly exploded into vaudeville, silent film, Wild West shows, and circuses. The Cowboy Jew became a stock rodeo clown that persisted until at least 1931, and then resurfaced in the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era, with comedian Kinky Friedman in what John Cawelti called the “six-gun schlemiel” role, which Gene Wilder explicitly demonstrated as the gunslinger in Blazing Saddles (1974) and the rabbi in The Frisco Kid (1979).4 This character’s overlooked history forms the cultural context for my analysis of these songs, in which both the musical language and iconography are key measures of interpretation. By analyzing newly available illustrated song slide proofs from the Library of Congress as well as newspaper clippings, sheet music covers, musical texts, and recordings, I will show that these songs display elements of fantasy and ambivalence toward Jewish-American assimilation. While previous scholarship has focused primarily on in-group Jewish reactions to the Cowboy Jew, with this character’s long existence and musical accompaniment beyond the bounds of Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville it behooves us to extend our reception analysis to the population at large. These three songs, with their troublesome and grotesque imagining of the intersection of Jews, Cowboys, and American Indians, demonstrate anxieties about the integration of Jews into American society, both from within the Jewish community and from without. The lyrics, musical language of texts and recordings, and art point to two simultaneous interpretations. Internal to the Jewish community was a fascination with two very different ideas of [End Page 27] American pastoral figures (Cowboy and Indian) and anxiety about the place of Jews in American life, a fascination that demonstrates an agency-rich “performativity,” to borrow Judith Butler’s terminology for the enactment of self.5 External to the Jewish community, the very first emergent rodeo clowns used the Cowboy Jew figure as a classic means of ridicule, aligning with Butler’s “precarity,” a politically induced vulnerability to social violence immortalized in Columbia Pictures’ Rodeo Dough (1931).6 This historical and musical contextualization complicates the predominant paradigm of Jewish postmodern musicology and ethnomusicology, that of an implicitly desired and also successful journey toward racial whiteness based on Jewish participation in blackface minstrelsy, a complication promoted by Rachel Rubinstein and also recently by Rose Rosengard Subotnik.7 Since Jews, like Irishmen and Italians, were not seen as white until mid-century, the narrative focusing on the journey to whiteness is obviously an important line of investigation. But it does not represent the entire story of the relationship between Jews and non-Jewish religious and ethnic/racial groups in America, nor the whole story of assimilation, as seen either internally within the Jewish community or outside, by mainstream America.8 Although there are previous scholarly analyses of these songs, the existing work has been confined by discipline. By examining all of the available archival evidence (much of it only recently digitized and searchable) as well as analyzing the music, I show that scholarship that reaches across disciplines can add more nuance and improve our understanding of this historical identity formation, particularly when the subject of study is a musical artifact. Furthermore, while the history of Jews in blackface minstrelsy is well documented in many fields of scholarship, as is to some degree the adoption of the Indian persona, the adoption of the cowboy persona...