The Goblet and the Plastic Cup: Tradition, Technology, and Art in Theodore Bikel’s “Jewish Folk Songs” Albums

• In Event: The Modes and Objects of Yiddish Popular Culture

Abstract

Theodore Bikel begins the liner notes of the 1958 LP "Theodore Bikel Sings Jewish Folk Songs" self-reflexively, acknowledging, “for some time now it has been a debatable point as to whether or not I have the right to call myself a folksinger.” Here, Bikel points to a number of important issues, namely, what it means to call oneself a “folksinger,” particularly in mid-twentieth century America, and the complex task of defining “Jewish folk songs.”
In this paper, I analyze the song selection, performance style, and album visuals of Bikel’s 1958 LP and its 1959 follow-up "Theordore Bikel Sings More Jewish Folksongs," to highlight the process by which a definition of “Jewish folk song” became represented within the landscape of the American folk recording industry. Particularly, I work to unpack the connection between Bikel’s claims to folkloric authenticity—demonstrated through appeals to his family heritage—and the American folk music apparatus that presented imagined folk purity through the medium of modern technology. Specifically, I tie Bikel’s LPs to the legacies of American and European folklore projects, which were constructed through a selective relationship to communal memory, an imagined past, and idealized traditions.
Drawing on Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s discussion of "Theodore Bikel Sings Jewish Folk Songs" in the context of the klezmer revival, I diverge to emphasize the album as an important case study in the ideology and aesthetics of “folk music” in America. Informed by the work of scholars such as Joshua Walden and Gabriella Safran, I explore how Bikel evokes the Eastern European roots of Jewish folk music collection in his mid-twentieth century recordings. Further, I draw on the work of American folk music scholars Benjamin Filene and Karl Hagstrom Miller to situate Bikel’s LPs within the environment of American folk recordings--whose technologically mediated presentations of the past reflect fraught claims to American belonging throughout the twentieth century, and particularly in the decades following WWII.

Author

• Ezekiel Levine, New York University