In his 2014 interview with The Forward, Black seemed taken aback that the reporter even knew he was Jewish. “Only in America can a guy from anywhere go to sleep a pauper and wake up a millionaire,” he sang. He sported a flag on his jacket, and said he was proud of the band’s 1963 hit, “Only in America,” recorded just when the counterculture was about to take off. He toured across America for decades, but New Yorkers loved their native son best. (He also made sure the reporter knew that female fans were, in his sixth decade, still delivering panties to him.) The band wore sweaters and were clean-cut, but Black liked to project a mysterious, bad-boy affect: he boasted of his friendship with the Mafia boss John Gotti, and in a 1994 profile refused to tell The New York Times what his name was before “Black” - in fact, nothing in the long profile refers to his Jewishness. The group was big enough to open for the Beatles in 1964, at the Fab Four’s very first U.S. There were other hits: “Come a Little Bit Closer” (which peaked at #3 on the charts), about an encounter with a seductress in a Mexican border town that ends badly and their cover of the Drifters’ “This Magic Moment” (peaked at #6). The song peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. With his dark good looks and his operatic delivery, he affected a Latin persona one of the band’s most popular numbers was “Cara Mia,” in which he pledges to his presumably Italian object of adoration that “I will be your love until the end of time,” escalating into a heart-stopping falsetto. Bandmates dubbed him “The Voice” and it stuck. He became known for his powerful reach-for-the-rafters voice and his dramatic delivery. There are differing accounts of how he got the name Black there’s evidence he was using it professionally before he joined Jay and the Americans, but he insisted he muttered “Jay Blatt” when Mike Douglas, the daytime talk show host, asked him his name, and Douglas repeated “Black” and it stuck.īlack, raised in an Orthodox family, had sung as a youngster with the choir of Cantor Moshe Koussevitzky. There was a condition: Blatt had to take on the first name Jay. He was selling shoes in 1962 or 1963 at Thom McAn when a buddy, Marty Kupersmith, who knew Blatt from the Jewish doo-wop circuit, asked him to take the place of Jay Traynor, who had quit Jay and the Americans, a group that had scored a single hit in 1962. 22 at 82, of cardiac arrest brought on by pneumonia.
“I was a bad kid.”īlack, born David Blatt, died in Queens, New York, on Oct. “Three yeshivas,” Black said twice for emphasis in a 2014 interview. We do not share data with third party vendors. Get Jewish Exponent's Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories
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