Josef Josef

I have mentioned before my penchant for obscure music in Nordic languages. This originally started as a lazy way of learning Finnish. We all know how singing makes things more memorable and one of the earliest things I learned in Finnish, after essential phrases like "you have beautiful blue eyes", was the song Incey Wincey Spider, or Hämä Hämähäki as that arachnid is known in the land of the Kalevala.

A while ago the algorithm on YouTube threw up a band named Komiat ('the Handsome Ones'). Young guys playing old school dance music (as in dancing with partners, not disco). I liked them and came across this track which I'd never heard before in any language. Some of you chaps will no doubt know the song well as Joseph Joseph as sung by the Andrews Sisters during the War and dismiss me as an ignorant young whippersnapper.  I very much like this band and this version. It's an absolutely banging choon and the singer has a very good voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6FmgT3V06E

Here's the lyric if you want to sing along - go on, I know you want to.

Singalonga Max (Foy)

It was only today whilst idling on my sofa that I discovered the older versions through comments below the videos. First this wartime version in Finnish by the Harmony Sisters and then the Andrews Sisters version. It was then but a short hop (again led by the comments*) to the even older Yiddish version. Apparently it was originally written in 1923 in Yiddish (Music, Nelly Casman; Lyric, Samuel Steinberg) and later translated into English by Saul Chaplin.

The Finnish lyric isn't a straight translation of the English. For all I know it might have been directly translated from the Yiddish, but I don't know what the Yiddish version says. Instead of the song being a woman lamenting her lover not popping the question, the Finnish refers to a man who clearly has a woman in every town. Maybe that was just a bit too much for Anglo-American ears in the 30s and 40s, so we end up with a man who just cannot commit rather than a real tom cat.

Finnish Version	English Translation of the Finnish	English Version
Oi Josef, Josef, muistatko kun kuljit maan halki etelästä pohjoiseen? Sä kaikki neidot syliisi suljit kuiskaten: "Näämme kohta uudelleen."	Oh, Josef, Josef, do you remember when you travelled through the land from south to north? You held every woman in your arms and whispered: "We will [meet] soon again."	Oh Joseph Joseph, won’t you make your mind up, it’s time I knew just how I stand with you. My heart’s no clock that I can wind up, each time we make up after being through.

Presumably the Finns main Axis ally would never permit a version in their country, given the songs origins, but it would not surprise me to find a version in German from earlier. There was a black market in Jazz music records in wartime Germany so this song could well have been circulating**. I did manage to find a Danish version from 1938, so maybe there's more out there. If by any chance you do come across the song in other languages, I'd love to hear about them.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the song. Stay well!


* it's cheering to note in these dark times that the 'bottom of the internet' is not completely full of bile spewed out by angry nationalists and wazzocks.
** BBC Radio 4 had a programme a while back featuring a German guy who had made it his work to research the underground black music scene in Nazi Germany.