RE: Benny Bell

[Solidarity Foundation <svzandt...>]

I can see why people might think Benny Bell was Italian. In one of his
records, he sings to the tune of a lively Italian tarantella, beginning
in broad Yiddish, then after about the second verse, he sings a verse
in the purest Sicilian. Then he throws in a few lines of spoken patter
in Yiddish -- something like this:

Hot ir farshtanen alts vos ikh hob gezugt? -- Vell, don't vorry
menshelakh, ikh farshtey oykh nit!

(Did you understand everything I just said? -- Well, don't worry,
folks, I don't understand it either!)

Then I think he ends with a verse in Yiddish again.

However, Benny Bell was actually Jewish. His real name was Ben Samberg.
He started his own record label, Bell Records, about 1940 and most if
not all his singles were on this label. He lived in the Brownsville
section of Brooklyn, not far from the Epstein brothers. Max Epstein
told me that the music on these records was provided by the Epstein
brothers (not necessarily all of them at once).

Other than Max Epstein, the source for the above information is
THE BLUE PAGES, The Encyclopedic Guide to 78 R.P.M. Party Records,
by David Diehl (1996), which is on the Web somewhere.

When I was a kid of about 9 years old (in Brooklyn), I never heard of
Benny Bell, but all us boys knew the song "Shaving Cream." Benny Bell
also did a Yiddish - English version of the Toreador Song from Carmen,
with the famous lines, "Toreador, Don't spit on the floor, Use the
cuspidor, What do you think its for?" We knew THAT one when we were
about seven. 

I think it's a real tribute to Benny Bell that he was -- absolutely
without this intention -- generating genuine folklore in Brooklyn in
the 1950s.

Itsik Leyb

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