Louis Armstrong

Satchmo

If there’s any one person to thank for bringing this bit of murderous, Marxist musical-theater satire to a large English-language audience, it’s none other than Louis Armstrong.  He was not the first performer of an English version of the song, but he made it swing, and he certainly was the first performer with sufficient popular heft to expand an audience for “Mack the Knife” beyond the theatergoers familiar with Brecht’s play.

In the previous post, we mentioned the contrast between Macheath’s fictitious crimes and the song’s somewhat festive or lighthearted approach. With the introduction of the Armstrong version, though, the song really does get significantly brighter.  One of the things that probably boosted its popularity, was the decision to use the later Blitzstein translation, which was developed for the 1954 Broadway revival of Threepenny.  (The original Broadway show in the 30s was not successful, and the song had no traction with the listening public.)  The Blitzstein translation conveniently omits the original’s references to rape and to children killed by arson.

Louis Armstrong’s lyrics usually wind up somewhere in the vicinity of the following:

Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white
Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe
And he keeps it, ah, out of sight

Ya know when that shark bites with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves, oh, wears old MacHeath, babe
So there’s never, never a trace of red

Now on the sidewalk, huh, huh, whoo sunny morning, un huh
Lies a body just oozin’ life, eek
And someone’s sneakin’ ’round the corner
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?

There’s a tugboat, huh, huh, down by the river dontcha know
Where a cement bag’s just a drooppin’ on down
Oh, that cement is just, it’s there for the weight, dear
Five’ll get ya ten old Macky’s back in town

Now did ja hear ’bout Louie Miller? He disappeared, babe
After drawin’ out all his hard-earned cash
And now MacHeath spends just like a sailor
Could it be our boy’s done somethin’ rash?

Now Jenny Diver, ho, ho, yeah, Sukey Tawdry
Ooh, Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown
Oh, the line forms on the right, babe
Now that Macky’s back in town

I said Jenny Diver, whoa, Sukey Tawdry
Look out to Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown
Yes, that line forms on the right, babe
Now that Macky’s back in town

Look out, old Macky’s back!!

Here’s a 1956 performance from London:

Here’s another, similar 1956 performance from Chicago:

“Mack the Knife” by Louis Armstrong (Spotify)

I mentioned in the previous post my thinking regarding one of the attractions of this song being its ability to touch on murderous topics with a slight bit of indirection (slight, I suppose, although indirection is the song’s central premise).  It’s a murder ballad for those who wish to remain at some distance from the details, and unlike some of our other songs, it seems the point is not really to empathize with either the killer or the victim.  In some respects, this separation threatens to make “Mack the Knife” sort of an anti-“murder ballad.”   The listener gets distance from rather than closeness to the action.

In a way, “Mack the Knife” is an interesting choice of song for the genial Mr. Armstrong.  The lecture I cited in the previous post, “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about ‘Mack the Knife‘” gets a couple things wrong (including the release date of Armstrong’s version, but suggests “this was a time in American history when the thought of murder visualized by a black male’s voice was enough to send shivers across one’s skin.”  Presumably, the author means “…a time in American history when for many whites…”

If we can put it this way, Armstrong was rather controversial for being relatively uncontroversial in an era of controversy.  He was called upon to take more stands for racial justice than he did, and at times faulted within the African American community for enjoying cultural access that many others were denied.  It would be inappropriate for me to venture a judgment on his choice of “Mack the Knife” relative to the racism that suffused the culture around him, but it would also be inappropriate to ignore it.  Was he subtly tweaking the majority culture or merely entertaining?  Is the Blitzstein translation the only one “safe” enough for him to pull off?  He didn’t go into murderous territory much.  Despite Armstrong’s “Storyville” origins, as described in the clip above, most of his material stays far away from criminal or underworld themes. I’ve done a bit of combing through his discography.  The only other murder ballad material I could find was “Frankie and Johnny.”  As we’ve noted before, that song also has its own particular trajectory of bowdlerization and cultural appropriation.  There may be more, but it doesn’t stand out as a major theme to me in Armstrong’s work.  

What’s most interesting to me, though, is not only that Armstrong takes the song and starts improvising musically–it is jazz, after all–but that he begins a trajectory of improvising with the lyrics.  This is a trend that continues through the jazz and some of the pop versions of the song.  Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” became the most famous, and he will do this, too.  We’ll get to him in the next post.  When I talk about improvising with the lyrics, though, it’s not just that Armstrong makes up new ones.  That’s old hat.  What’s interesting is that Armstrong has the song “break character,” or shatter the fourth wall.

Screen capture of the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” commercial (Stick around for the sponsorship info at the end.  It’s perfect.)

Yes, in Louis Armstrong’s version on the Blitzstein translation, “Polly Peachum” becomes “Lotte Lenya.”  From there, the door is open for a number of other interpreters to play with the song–injecting real names into the song’s fictional context, and eventually making the song about itself.  Whether introducing Lenya’s name was an unintentional gaffe that he stuck with, or an effort to pierce the willing suspension of disbelief–a wink to the audience about the “trustworthiness” of the song or the reliability of the singer–is difficult to say.

First Lady of Song

Ella Fitzgerald

Where Armstrong opens the door to improvising around the edges of the song, Ella Fitzgerald bursts right on through, intentionally or unintentionally.  In her 1960 recording Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife, Fitzgerald apparently forgets the lyrics, and improvises the rest of the way through, in the process delighting the audience (much of whose English was perhaps not the best to begin with) and winning two Grammys for Best Female Vocal Performance (single and album).  Here’s a Spotify recording of that performance:

“Mack the Knife” by Ella Fitzgerald (Spotify)

And the same performance on YouTube:



Having been so well-rewarded for her quick thinking and genius-level musicality, Fitzgerald made her improvised lyrics the new starting point for subsequent versions of the song.  Her performances of “Mack” start to include verses about others singing the song and about herself singing the song.  In this version, from a performance in Stockholm, Sweden, Fitzgerald calls out Darin and Armstrong, and scat sings in gentle parody of the latter as she swings with her characteristic energy through the song.




I now feel like I should update where we are, for those of you keeping score at home:

• This song came from a satirical Marxist musical about class relations, which tells a fictitious story in order to make a real point.
• The song’s villian/anti-hero/protagonist, Mack, serves as a metaphor for the playwright’s critique.
• Mack is never observed actually perpetrating the crimes, or described as doing so…that is the point of the song.
• Then, people from real life (e.g. Lotte Lenya) start inhabiting the fictional universe of Mack.
• Finally, the song, to the extent it is “about” anything, becomes about people singing the song, including the person singing the song while you’re listening to it.
• But, it swings.  Are you having fun yet?

Frank Sinatra, in New York City, 1984

“Mack the Knife” by Frank Sinatra (Spotify)

Here’s a YouTube version, which I’m including despite disrupting my aforementioned expectation that Murder Ballad Monday would be a Buffett-free zone (no disrespect intended).  Perhaps Buffett couldn’t resist the lure of shark fins…




OK, whew.  Had enough of that?  You begin to suspect that for a number of reasons popular song just doesn’t do a very good job with murder ballads–if we can, in the end, call “Mack the Knife” a murder ballad.  It’s something similar to taking a refrain about the Black Death and making it a children’s game, except the Black Death was real, and Mackie’s not.  To my mind, Sinatra’s version is a reductio ad absurdum of the drift toward making the song about itself and, by extension, only about the singer singing the song.  It’s actually hard not to hear a little bit of self-pity that Bobby Darin outdid him in his earlier version.

We’ve gone far afield of our normal, folk-informed genre of discussion to highly-produced big band numbers; not intentionally, really, but it does lend a certain amount of perspective to our normal fare.  I would wager that we’re used to singers disappearing within the song to a much greater extent than either Fitzgerald or Sinatra do here.  We normally stick with what Greil Marcus termed “old, weird America.”  What we find with performances like this is just how contorted and silly songs can get in “new, mainstream culture America.”

If we need more evidence to this effect, we have only to note that Sinatra’s 1980s recording preceded only slightly McDonald’s introducing “Mac Tonight” as an icon to peddle burgers.



At this point in our exploration, I feel more confident in confirming my earlier assertion that this song moves into popularity mostly to the extent that it distances itself from any real resonance with ideas of “deadly deeds.”  The Moritat itself becomes increasingly ironic, at least in the lyrics, and to a certain extent in the music.  It’s very catchy and is a tremendous amount of fun packed into a 16 bar melody; but ultimately, whatever equivalent of “folk process” is going on here, if it can be called that, is pointing out that there might not have been a whole lot of “there there” to begin with.  That is, that the song’s role in the satire may be to tell a political point, and not a psychological or emotional one–and empathy does not get generated in the listener (or the singer, apparently) for anyone but oneself.  This may be too strong.  We’ll see.  In our next post, we’ll take a look at some attempts to bring some power back into the song. 

Perhaps it’s just the logical outgrowth of the Blitzstein translation–or at least the parts of it that Armstrong and his branch of “Mack” singers use.  As we’ll soon see, Satchmo and the rest tend to leave out more than just the rape and arson.  Once you’ve left out some of the core ingredients, or substituted artificial ones, it gets easier to start making more substitutions.  Again, all is not lost.  Just hang in there ’til the next post.

Coda: Back to the Music

With a post that began with Louis Armstrong, it seems appropriate to close with noting that “Mack the Knife” has made its way into instrumental jazz as a rich 16-bar sequence of core material.  I think of it as a companion piece, after a fashion, to jazz versions of “My Favorite Things.”  Of these, I’ve heard none better than Sonny Rollins’s:

“Moritat (Mack the Knife)” by the Sonny Rollins Quintet (Spotify)