Posts from the “Blog” Category
When Hank Ballard and The Midnighters released a minor blues number they called “The Twist” back in 1959, it was a forgettable b-side. When Chubby Checker covered it a year later, it not only became an a- side single that rose to #1 on the Billboard charts, it became a social event, a culture-spanning dance …
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For American Jews, ghosts of the past, ghosts of other worlds, languages, longer names, are part of what it means to occupy the present. How Jews embrace or ward off those lingering spirits is a prime ingredient in configuring identity. That, at least, is what Donald Weber talks about in his must-read book, Haunted in …
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George Goldner, a Jewish kid born in New York in 1918, was a garment dealer turned rock and roll entrepreneur with a thing for Tiffany cigarette cases. In the 50’s he founded legendary rock, R&B, and doo wop labels like Rama, Gone, and Gee, and then Red-Bird in the sixties with Lieber & Stoller. But …
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As the 93-year-old pianist and the Korean singer launched into a high-octane take on “Hava Nagilah,” the sold-out crowd went wild, swaying, shimmying and stomping to the beat. Was this another one of those weird dreams I have whenever I drink too much Concord wine? No, it was the Jews On Vinyl Revue at the …
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From the opening images of an eerily serene Barry Manilow and a pelvis-thrusting Neil Diamond, the album covers in “And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl” are so perfectly dated—and hilariously kitschy—that it’s impossible to look away. The product of two men’s obsessive record collecting, the book examines 20th-century Jewish history …
Read MoreCopyright 2016 Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation
