Oh Helen

Helen Shapiro was Britain’s buck-toothed teen pop queen of the 60s, who never changed her name. Shapiro’s first gig was lead singer of Susie and the Hula Hoops, a band that included a bass player named Mark Feld who did change his name, to Marc Bolan. She quickly left the band and in ‘61, at the age of 14, had her first solo chart hit, “Don’t Treat Me Like A Child.” She was no kid novelty act, though, and over the next few years Shapiro released tons of hit singles and a stack of LPs that made her so huge that when she did her first nation-wide tour in England, The Beatles were her opening act. She even published her own teen advice book, Helen Shapiro’s New Book For Girls. Campus curls up with it at night and reports that it includes the top ten rules of good dress (Golden Rule number 2– “undies may not show but they mattter - -they are a secret between you and your dress”), ”My Friends — The stars,” a collection of photos of her with (Jewish-American) Neil Sedaka and (Arab-Canadian) Paul Anka, and Films of the Year (Steve Reeves in the little remembered Son of Spartacus).This is her version of Sedaka’s “Little Devil” which is remarkable for Shapiro’s lack of vocal re-interpretation– a nearly note for note gender-flipped replica of the original. The track appeared on the 1962 LP, Tops With Me, which she recorded with another no-name-changer, Martin Slavin and His Orchestra. The liner notes tell us that her hobbies include “jiving, netball and playing banjo.” In the 1980s, Shapiro hit the gospel circuit and traded it all for Jesus: “One of the interesting things for me when I first became a believer in Jesus was to find out how Jewish it is and that I didn’t have to stop being Jewish to believe in Jesus.” I blame the netball and the banjo.

The Barry Sisters: Our Way

Claire and Merna were The Bagelman Sisters before they became The Barry Sisters and, soon after, the reigning queens of Yiddish swing from the late 30s on. Though best known for turning Yiddish folk tunes into jazzified pop hits (their purring “Tumbala-Lika” can still survive any tasteful DJ set), I’ve always liked them best when they go slightly off book, especially all of their impressive Spanish-language sides (check back here soon for those). But my fave Barry Sisters album comes when most thought their career had long fizzled, in 1973, when they released Our Way on the aptly named Mainstream Records. Instead of Yid hits in pop idioms, this time they did big pop hits in Yid idioms– “It’s Impossible,” “Mame,” “Love Story.” The best of the lot is this version of Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” (sung originally by BJ Thomas on the Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid soundtrack). In Yiddish, it became “Trop’ns Fin Regen Oif Mein Kop” and proved that even a dying language could save 70s radio from itself.

Belle Barth: Uncensored

Pearlstein, Bernstein, Levitt, and Fink. Not a law firm, but a roll call of forbidden fruit, the “Nice Jewish Girls” who torture and taunt the Gentile bloodline of a young Loudon Wainwright III perhaps the most un-Jewish of all non-Jewish American singers. “Not Nordic names, I know,” he whines. It’s a short, odd ode to Country Day school boy-lust for the Other girls, the ones with the long names, the ones in the same tax bracket who hold out the mythical promise of exotic possibility somewhere deep in the suburbs. Jewish girls don’t usually get a good rap in pop culture– the wallet-draining, life-ruining, soul-stealing Jewish American Princess archetype has pretty much held Jewish women in a representational stranglehold for decades– and his song is no Jewish feminist anthem, but at least it’s momentarily celebratory. Plus, Wainwright comes off as the deprived and depaved one here. He may have the blue-blood, but they make his “juices flow” and by the song’s end, he sounds desperate for what he can’t have, like he’d do anything for them, like he’d stalk their Shabbas dinners, like he’d memorize Funny Girl, like he’d have a poster of Grace Adler on his dorm room wall (if she’d been invented yet). I’ve always wondered what would have happened if Wainwright had added Salzman to his Hebraic Hall of Fame– Annabelle Salzman to be exact. In the 50s and 60s, Salzman became the bawdy wonder Belle Barth, the gruff, potty-mouthed queen of a not-so-nice-Jewish-girls court that also included the likes of Pearl Williams and Patsy Abbott. Barth was a working-class trash-talker who worked nights in Miami Beach and Manhattan, sitting in front of the piano, singing about shmucks and oral sex, dishing insults at the insurance men in the front row. “If I embarrass you,” Barth liked to say, “Tell your friends.” Wainwright would have been on the next train back to Westchester.