Only in the U.S.A.


Not that anyone is asking me, but if I had to nominate the most patriotic song I know, it would unequivocally be Allan Sherman's "Harvey and Sheila," a novelty song about Jewish assimilation to the tune of "Hava Nagila."

I have pretty uncomplicated feelings about the husky-voiced parodist whose heyday came just before I was born: I think he's great. Indeed he's in that rare class of artists, along with Chaplin or Dr. Seuss or the Beatles, whose work I adored immediately as a kid and discovered new levels in as I've grown older, even as I've retained an unbroken link with the child who relished the rhyme of "scare ya" and "malaria."

Okay, so about those new levels: Probably in part because by the time I revisited this ironic ode to suburbia (which really ends up being a sneaky tribute to city life), I had become a fan of Percy Grainger's arrangement of "Country Gardens," but mostly because I was a grown man living in the limbo between suburb and city (i.e., Los Angeles), this song now unaccountably moves me by its final verse.
Likewise "Harvey and Sheila," which to my kid's ears sounded like little more than a play on acronyms—IBM, CPA, BBD&O, PBX, RCA, etc.—with an odd minor-key tune that sped up for some reason. At least two things have deepened my abiding affection for the song. One is Sherman's delirious commitment to the alphabet wordplay—the daughters of this couple are named Bea and Kay, of course, and the "swimming pool filled with H2O" gets me every time.

The other is its wry cultural wisdom—not just the sly joke that these one-time New Yorkers who "worked for JFK" as a young couple "switched to the GOP" after moving to West L.A., as he shrugs, over the live audience's knowing laughter, "That's the way things go." (Ain't it the truth.) It is also the whole premise of the song and its wrenching subtext, which eluded me entirely as a kid: While so much of Sherman's shtick was based on the juxtaposition of Jewish surnames, Yiddish slang, and Noo Yawk dialect into WASPy Mitch Miller tunes and forms ("Sarah Jackman, How's By You?," or the tongue-twisting patter of "Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max"), "Harvey and Sheila" does something like the reverse, repurposing a folk tune from the Pale of Settlement to tell an aspirational story of wholesome, bourgeois mid-century Americana.

Or is it entirely wholesome and aspirational? Is there not a faint, bittersweet tang to the final turn, in which we find that Harvey, the modest accountant who met his wife in a stuck elevator, is now a wealthy "VIP," and that "this could be/only in the U.S.A."? Is the song saying: On the one hand, look how far we've come—and on the other hand, look how far we've gone? I don't know. But this sounds to me like the only kind of qualified patriotism, grateful but guilty, I can endorse in my middle age. All that and a periodic table joke—is it any wonder this song positively slays this schmaltzy goy?

(Fun side note: For the wedding reception of a mixed marriage I was hired to lead music for, I was asked to prepare "Hava Nagila," and I based my chart on the Sherman arrangement. It turns out there are differences between his version and the way the folk tune is most often done. There may be a reason that was the only wedding bandleader gig I've got so far!)

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