When Victims Rule (pdf)

JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA (PT. 3)
the control of professional promoters who sought to make music profitable.
[They adapted] the technique of advertising, song plugging, and
vaudeville … Some promoters, like Joe Glaser (who managed Louis
Armstrong in the thirties) were associates of organized crime who left
the underworld when prohibition was repealed. Glaser apparently had
overseen Al Capone’s profits from the Sunset Cafe and a prostitution
ring before he became Armstrong’s manager in 1935. Many more promoters,
however, were veterans of Tin Pan Alley, Manhattan’s songpublishing
industry, including Irving Mills, a former singer and songwriter
who managed Duke Ellington’s and other black bands in the
thirties.” [PERETTI, p. 147]
Glaser ran the Associated Booking Corporation, often “the exclusive agent
for many of the top Black performers. He became a close associate of many of
the top underworld figures in Chicago and New York, whom he met through
his band-booking agency.” [MOLDEA, p. 14] Glaser had been an early partner
in the company with eventual MCA chief Jules Stein. In 1962, mob-linked attorney
Sidney Korshak, also Jewish, gained control of the ABC company. [MC-
DOUGAL, p. 141]
Mills and Paddy Harmon, owner of Chicago’s Dreamland Cafe, “sought
and gained spurious renown, as Mills took partial credit for many Ellington
compositions and Harmon patented and gave his name to a trumpet mute that
had long been popular among Joe Oliver and other black players.” [PERETTI,
p. 148] The rip-off of Black artists was a norm for the era. As Al Silverman notes
in the case of Fats Waller:
“In his time Fats wrote the melodies to over 360 songs. Not that many
bear his name today, unfortunately, because when money was needed
he’d write the music and sell all rights to unscrupulous Tin Pan Alley
characters.” [SILVERMAN, p. 129-130]
“That practice of show business share-cropping … in the 1920s and 1930s,”
notes the director of Harlem’s Apollo Amateur Night, Ralph Cooper, “existed
right on through the fifties and sixties. Its bitterness still exists among many
performers to this day – a bitterness from the theft of their songs, their sound,
their talent.” [COOPER, p. 199] Jewish singers “Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor
and Al Jolson,” notes Donald Fischer,
“performed in blackface at the beginning of their careers, singing
black songs. They later built on their successes in this medium to develop
national statures and professional successes with other music. However,
their early songs were for the most part borrowed or plagiarized
from African-American sources, with little or no public recognition – or
monetary reward – for the creative talents that produced them.” [FIS-
CHER, D., 6-30-2000, p. 21A]
Jews were also prominent in the overseeing of the Black community’s jazz
life, including the control of musical clubs in Black neighborhoods in a variety
of American cities. “The invasion of the Black community by organized crime
lords with connections to downtown money,” notes Ted Vincent, “was certainly
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