JEWISH JAZZ BECOMES OUR NATIONAL MUSIC 71
parlors. Headers have listened to much worse stuff than Mary's words, but covered by Yiddish "jazz." It takes cold type to show what a song really is. A good test for a song is to try to read it aloud. Few normal people can.
"O-Hi-O," as sung by Yiddish comedians, has a stench of its own. It may be commented on more extensively later as an example of the Yiddish practice of having three grades of the same song, to suit different degrees of degenerate appetites.
Such songs are not the worst, by any means. Jewish purveyors to degenerate appetites have a peculiarly devilish system of presenting the same song in two or three grades. There will be the song as it is sold at the music store to addle-pated young men and women who fill their leisure with hearing or humming this syncopated senility young men and women who pitiably imagine they are keeping up with the times. The songs thus sold and sung are rotten enough. But there is the same song, Class 2. The theme and the melody are the same, but it goes "a little further." There is a line or two in each stanza which dips below even the low standard which Jewish "jazz" has permitted in some of our parlors. And then there is Class 3-same theme, same melody but "going the limit."
Young men about town usually know Class 2 and Class 3. The instance has been known that young women have become acquainted with these lower grades also. Forgetfulness by young men while singing at the piano evenings has given hints of the filthier version. And even where version 1 has been strictly adhered to, the mutual knowledge, politely concealed, has created an atmosphere far from wholesome.
The diabolical cunning with which an unclean atmosphere is created and sustained through all classes of society and by the same influence, will not be overlooked by any observer. There is something Satanic about it, something calculated with demonic shrewdness. And the stream flows on and on, growing worse and worse, to the degradation of the non-
