Happy Armistice Day (Veterans Day)! And God Bless America!

 

In 1893, a 5-year-old Jewish boy named Israel stepped off the boat at Ellis Island with his parents and six siblings. Having spent all they had for the journey to America from the Russian Empire, they arrived virtually penniless. Israel had few memories of his life in what is now Belarus, except that his house had been burned to the ground. To top it off, when they arrived at Ellis, their last name was changed. Quite a beginning for such a little kid.

Israel’s father found work at a kosher meat shop and his mother became a midwife. Most of his siblings were employed, and at the age of 8, after only 2 years of school, “Izzy” began selling newspapers on the street corner.

He heard the music coming from the saloons all around him, and when he would sing the songs, people tossed coins at his feet. He soon discovered his gift... and his calling.

When Israel was just 13, his father died, making life harder for his mother. Because he wasn’t bringing home much money, Izzy decided to leave home at 14. He lived on the Lower East Side with hundreds of other homeless boys.

With his voice as his only tool for making money, Izzy sang at saloons and anywhere people would pay him, and he finally landed a job as a singing waiter in Chinatown. After the bar closed at night, he would pick out tunes on the piano, teaching himself to play, but the rest of his life, because he never learned to read music, he only played in the key of F-sharp.

Izzy’s persistence paid off, and by the next year, he’d sold his first song for 75¢, which he had to split with the guy who helped him compose it. The publisher misspelled his last name, but he liked it and it stuck. It’s the name he used on his hit song of 1911, which sold millions of sheet music copies. He changed what his first initial stood for and kept the misspelled last name until his death in 1989, at age 101.

By 1917, the US was embroiled in WWI, Izzy was now a US citizen with notoriety and money. And then the Army drafted him... to write music. He was put to work on a fundraiser musical about life in the Army. It was a smash hit and raised $150,000. He had written a song to include, but at the last minute, pulled it out. He would have to tweak it a little.

Throughout the 1920s, everything he touched turned to gold. He became the name and face of true American music. He also co-founded ASCAP, an organization to protect copyrights of music artists.

In the late 1930s, as WWII loomed in Europe, as a Jewish American, Israel felt the need to respond to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism with a peaceful song. He thought about the song he had shelved in 1918, and he pulled it out and changed a few lines.

He approached a famous singer who had her own radio show and asked her if she would lend her beautiful voice to its lyrics. She agreed.

And so, on Armistice Day, November 11, of 1938, the soprano with no formal voice lessons sang the music of the composer with no formal music training, and the famous sounds of Kate Smith singing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” soared across the air waves and into history.

“God Bless America” has become nearly the equivalent of the national anthem for Americans, and one of the most requested songs in our nation’s history.

One of his other most-requested songs you may recognize comes around every year about this time... “White Christmas.”

Israel Beilin, whom we all know as Irving Berlin, wrote over 900 songs, 19 musicals, and the scores to 18 movies, and received innumerable awards. To Berlin, who was unashamedly patriotic, his greatest award was that he came to America penniless and homeless, and she embraced him. And he loved her so much, he gave her her own style of music.

Happy Armistice Day (Veterans Day)! And God Bless America!