How Jewish music was made accessible back in the days of old

I’m going off on a tangent even before I start, but since Pesach I’ve been obsessed with the question: Who composed the classic tune to Dayeinu? The piyut appears in the siddurim of the Geonim, which means it’s at least a thousand years old, and it might have even been written during the time of the First Beis Hamikdash. But the tune? I would love to know its origins, if anyone out there knows the answer.

While I might not be old enough to know who wrote the tune to Dayeinu, I do want to take the liberty of talking about how Jewish music was made accessible back in the days of old. As a young child, I remember going down to the Lower East Side, to Stavsky’s Judaica or the famed Biegeleisen Jewish bookstore, where records in their jackets were lined up for customers to peruse and purchase. (Back then, a record cost just four dollars.) In Boro Park there was Focus Electronics on 13th Avenue and 46th Street, where you were also able to buy a record player for $6.99. In Crown Heights, it was Drimmers Electronics, which has since moved to Flatbush, and in Queens, it was Gift World on Main Street, which is the one store that still remains in the same place.

Then came Jewish concerts, which required a place from where to sell tickets — unlike today, where everything is done digitally. Tickets were sold at a small Eichlers on Coney Island Avenue, Lee Avenue Kosher Pizza in Williamsburg, Crown Heights Judaica, and Artec Electronics on 16th Avenue in Boro Park.

Recently, Shloimy Ash — a good friend and longtime entertainment booker at the Homowack — gave me a flyer from a Yigal Calek and London School of Jewish Song concert, which was held in Monsey at Ramapo High School in 1972. The amazing thing is that ticket prices for the concerts were $4.50 or $5.50, depending on where your seat was located. Now, I’ve done many concerts at Ramapo, and I know that the maximum seating is about 800, so do the math: If the organizers were lucky enough to sell out, they brought in $4,000 — and that’s before paying Yigal and choir to come in from London, hiring the orchestra, paying for the auditorium, advertising, and having two opening acts as well. So even if they sold out, they came away with enough money to buy two fresh hot dogs at Gottleib’s in Williamsburg.

Back then, when you got your new record, the first thing you did after peeling off the cellophane wrapper was to look at the back cover and read the credits (for example, that Meir Zlotowitz a”h designed the cover of the 1964 Pirchei Vol. I); then you’d check out the pictures and names of the choir members, which you’d memorize while listening to the record over and over again until you knew every intro and kneitch. Could anyone imagine they’d be seeing Avremel Friedman (Sdei Chemed, Pirchei’s Al Chomosayich), Mordechai Werdyger (David Werdyger albums), Judge Noach Dear a”h (Pirchei Sings — Eilecha), Rabbi Ephraim Wachman (Al Chomosayich, Camp Kol Ree-Nah), Rav Avraham Zucker a”h (NY School of Jewish Song), and even the Bobover Rebbe, Rav Benzion Halberstam (David Werdyger’s New Bobover Niggunim), in another life? These kids, with their ten-year-old faces, were the celebrities of our childhood.

Now, if you listened to the first song on a record and you weren’t so impressed, you could lift up the needle and move it over to the next set of grooves, or flip the entire thing over and listen to Side Two. But I had a trick that was my specialty: On most record players, you were able to change it from regular speed (33 1/2 rpm — revolutions per minute), and move it to 45 rpm, which meant that the record would speed up and go at 45 revolutions per minute. That, for some reason, was the speed for the smaller seven-inch vinyl singles, or “45s,” which only contained one song on each side. There were also the much older records called “78s” that came out until the 1950s, where the speed was 78 rpm.

It could be that I’m dating myself with this, as records have basically been gone for about 40 years, but they’re still available for purchase on certain online sites and through private collections. There are a lot of music buffs out there who still claim that vinyl records are the best sound quality to enjoy music on — and there’s nothing like reading those old back covers while the songs are playing.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of great a cappella music out there to keep you entertained over the next few weeks. And hey, you can go down to the basement and try to dig around for those old records, too.

 (Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1059