Burt Bacharach dies before his last album is released
A tribute to the reluctant Jew and hit maker who has a posthumous collaboration with Elvis Costello launching in March
Brigit Grant is the Jewish News Supplements Editor
Walk on By, I Say a Little Prayer, Alfie, Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head. These are some of the songs that were played on TV and radio on Thursday to mark the death of the 94-year-old Burt Bacharach, the multi-award winning talent who wrote so many hits.
Best music Oscars for the films Arthur and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid; eight Grammys including a Lifetime Achievement Award and a list of memorable songs (that is so long it defies running a list) that might start with Arthur’s Song (The Best that you can do) and end with Trains and Boats and Planes. But there is no end to Bacharach’s stable of classics.
Though he did his best to not talk about being Jewish, Bacharach was born to Jewish parents in Queens, New York, and he carried on learning the piano, so as not to upset his mother. As he wrote in his autobiography, Anyone Who Had a Heart in 2013. “The Jewish guilt started creeping in and I thought, ‘Jeez, I can’t do this to my mother.’ So I kept taking lessons . . . and maybe even practicing a little harder than before.”
As a teenager in Forest Hills, Queens, where the family moved, Burt formed a band and went under the name Happy Baxter, which, he wrote, “was as close as I could get to Bacharach without sounding Jewish.”
His family broke their ties with organised Judaism shortly after the composer was born, because of his maternal grandfather being unable to pay the shul fees after losing his money in the Crash of 1929. Grandpa Abe, as a gesture, also offered to resign as president of the Reform synagogue in Atlantic City, but when they accepted it, he never returned. “Whatever connection my mother might have had with being Jewish also ended right then and there, which helps explain the way I was raised.”
From this statement it was evident that the family never took him to shul and more alarmingly the young Burt avoided mentioning he was Jewish. “I got the feeling that this was something shameful that I should hide.” Choosing to hang out with Catholic school students, when his football team played a Jewish team he would echo the captain saying: “‘Let’s go and kick the s*** out of these Jews.”
Disguising himself best he could, Bacharach’s identity was more conspicuous than he hoped as no sooner had he arrived at McGill University in Montreal, he received an invitation from B’nai Brith to attend services. Drafted during the Korean War, his piano-playing skills saved him from being shipped overseas, as he went to entertain at military bases before being sent to Germany, where he wrote orchestrations for the resident band at the army recreational centre.
Remarkably it was Marlene Dietrich who took him to the Holy Land, as he became her orchestra director after the army and her tour included Israel. Bacharach claims Dietrich was the first person to sing in German on an Israeli stage.
For all his running away from his heritage Burt Bacharach ended up working alongside and within a Jewish collective at the legendary Brill Building, where he teamed up with Jewish lyricist Hal David and composed across the corridor from Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller and Jerry Moss. From the window could see Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil coming up with chart hits for Don Kirshner.
Bacharach and David wrote for Perry Como, but it was Dionne Warwick who made the most of their easy listening, hummable songs. Walk on By was the hit she was singing in the photo she posted on Twitter to mark the composer’s passing: “Dear Friend and my Musical Partner. Burt’s transition is like losing a family member.”
Married four times as mentioned, the hitmaker had two Jewish wives, his first Paula Stewart (born Dorothy Paula Zürndorfer), who is 93, and then lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, to whom he was married for nine years. Together they wrote Arthur’s Theme and the song That’s What Friends Are For.
Bacharach’s career spanned seven decades, and he found a new audience when he appeared in the 1997 film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and in the second Austin Powers film, Bacharach appeared alongside Elvis Costello. With Costello, who was an enormous fan of Bacharach’s work, the duo recorded Painted from Memory in 1998 which won a Grammy, but there is more – a final collaboration, The Songs of Bacharach & Costello, which will be released on 3 March . This will feature 19 previously unreleased recordings. Like so many ‘Jewish’ composers, his music lives on.
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