Banned Songs: Mack the Knife

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Yes, I can alphabetize. I just skipped this one for some reason yesterday. Maybe I was too excited to see a Kentuckian on the list. (There’s another one forthcoming.) So read this one before yesterday’s and they’ll be in alphabetical order. Other than that, here’s today’s song that got pulled off radio stations. Mack the Knife - Bobby Darin I’m not alone when I say my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon is What’s Opera, Doc, where Elmer runs around singing “Kill da wabbit.” He succeeds, and then is remorseful. At the end the “lifeless” Bugs looks at the camera and says, “What do you expect from an opera, a happy ending?” Hey, violence was part of opera. You know the story of Pagliacci, I assume (I mean, I do and I don’t know a thing about opera, except what Bugs and Elmer taught me ). So if you have something called The Threepenny Opera you can expect violence. That’s where this song had its origins. The play/opera/whichever dates to the 1920s, so this song was hardly new when Bobby Darin covered it in 1959. In fact, Darin’s version wasn’t the only cover rendition in the 50s, with Louis Armstrong having recorded it in 1955. But in the four short years between the two versions there was the rise of rock and roll and the perception that the music was contributing to juvenile delinquency and hooliganism. And so, with the worries of music ruining the minds of innocent youth, a number of radio stations wouldn’t play this horrible rock and roll song! Yeah, never mind it was, by that time, 30 years old and had been recorded numerous times. Bobby Darin, who was a teenage idol thanks to songs like “Splish Splash,” would turn youngsters into knife-wielding criminals with his version! Despite the fact that several radio stations wouldn’t play it, the song was the #2 song of the year 1959 based on its chart performance, and it won two Grammy awards. Now you have people being disemboweled on TV shows, so this song’s subtle “scarlet billows start to spread” sounds far more poetic than violent. It really was a different time. PS: trivia: Doc Severinsen was the trumpet player on this recording. Mack the Knife Written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht Recorded by Bobby Darin From That’s All, 1959 Reason banned: violent lyrics Fancy gloves, though: