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American Swing: Bei mir bist du schön - Belle Baker & Gene Kardos Orch., 1937

4,272 views · Published 18 November 2015 · 2:36 · Indexed 10 November 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2015 · Music

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Belle Baker with Orchestra dir. by Gene Kardos – Bei Mir Bist Du Schön, Fox Trot (Secunda /Jacobs) Brunswick  1937 (USA)

NOTE: In 1937, when the unknown all-girls’ vocal combo The Andrews Sisters recoded this song as their debut album, the world went crazy about it. The old Yddish song “Bay mir bistu sheyn”, which in 1932 was transcribed by Shlomo Secunda with text written by Jacob Jacobs for the Yddish play “I Would If I Could”, presented on stage of the collapsing Brooklyn theatre,  five years later, in the swing arrangement by Sammy Kahn  & Saul Chaplin, became all over the world the enormous dance hit. Even in the Third Reich it was widely played in the restaurants and dance halls with a slightly “Germanised” ID (German ö in its title...) and its Yddish origins carefully overlooked by the Nazi censors. In history of the world pop song after 1937, it would be difficult to find a counting singer who has not sung or not recorded this hit. In Poland it had several versions, the most popular being one with the lyrics written after WW2 and beginning with an inviting line”Bo ty masz w sobie coś” ( meaning: For you have that “something” in you, oh really, you do! And I can’t help, all the time I’m in love with you). This version was successfully performed and recorded in the mid-1950s by early post-war Polish jazz orchestra led by Charles Bovery, and sung half in English/ half in Polish by his vocalist - a Scottish singer Elisabeth Charles, who happened to perform for some time in the communist  Warsaw. 

Belle BAKER – born in New York in 1896 to a poor six-children Jewish family, was a vadeuville star and a torch singer, best known in the “Yddish” Brodaway, for her repertoire focused on the old and the newer Yddish songs (“Eli Eli”, “Rozhinkies myt mandeln", My Yiddishe Mama” etc.)  Her style was described as the combination of the modern jazz-singing with the tender lament of the Yiddish folk song.  Her career started on the streets of Brooklyn, where she sung for pennies, while selling flowers and newspapers. She was educated in a  public school, which she left at age nine to make a living in a dress factory. In 1910, when she sung at the Peoples Music Hall for 3 dollars a week, she was heard by Jacob P. Adler, the famous Yiddish actor, who hired her to play in his drama and to sing songs between acts. It opened her way to the Lower East Side music halls and nightclubs, she later played in the Yiddish Theater and toured the United States many times. Her deep, resonant voice guaranteed her stardom when she played in the prestigious Palace Theatre, sharing the program with Sarah Bernhardt. She immediately got contracts for the best Broadway musical stages, including Ziegfeld , she also was offered a radio program at the Columbia Network.  In later years, she toured America and Europe, her genre tending towards one of the vadeuville’s “red hot mamas”. Her last public show was on tv in 1955. Shortly thereafter she suffered a heart attack and died in Beverly Hills, LA in 1957.

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