Mama He Is Meshuga Nuts

This lyric

English

Music and words

Walter J. Kin

The publication credits Walter J. Kin with music and English words and explicitly describes the song as new writing, not an adaptation. Its Jewish character is built into a comic situation, a few familiar expressions and the musical setting. It does not require an earlier Yiddish song as a source to belong to that creative tradition.

The dramatic device is a pair of conversations with mothers. Each singer can describe the other person but cannot quite approach that person directly. Repeated complaints about madness and lacking courage delay the confession. The audience understands the feelings before the characters are ready to name them plainly.

The characters' changing guesses and descriptions are part of that nervous comedy. They should not be read as factual rules about how Jewish or American people behave. The turn comes when irritation reveals longing: missing the other person explains what the earlier complaints were concealing.

The author describes a klezmer folk-chanson duet with clarinet, accordion, trumpet and mixed choir, growing toward a hora-like celebration. In that intended arrangement the accompanying voices can act like an expanding audience to the private telephone calls.

Listen for the repeated phrases passing between the two sides and for the moment when the joke becomes tender. The principal lyric is English with Jewish vernacular expressions; a Russian article explains the scene without claiming a Russian recording has already been made.

Credits & rights

Music Walter J. Kin (RIGLI)

Language English

Publisher Rigli Publishing (Walter J. Kin)

Rights owner Rigli Publishing

Licensing Rigli Publishing

Copyright In album collective work (verify deposit)

Free to sing, free to teach

These songs are free for synagogues, JCCs, museums, schools, yeshivas and families. For everyone else, free to start, and a modest fee later, so the songs travel and take root.

Questions, or a use we have not thought of? Write to doublesign28@gmail.com.

More about the wider Jewish Songs. For All project at havanagila.org.

Listen here

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