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Alabama Mama. The record includes songs from other Weill musicals that are virtually unknown in the U.S., most of them close echoes of Threepenny Opera tunes. Composer Weill (who died in the U.S. in 1950) grew lyrical, sentimental and popular in such musicals as Lady in the Dark and Lost in the Stars. But in this album he is still the unreconstructed composer of gutter nihilisms. In one ditty. Singer Lenya is a bitter, jilted girl who snarls at her indifferent lover: "Take that pipe out of your kisser, you dog!" In the chilling Berlin Requiem she sings the horrifying vision of a drowned girl whose body is decomposing, limb by limb, as "God gradually forgot her, first her face, then her hands and finally her hair." Funniest for U.S. listeners is a moaning ragtime song written in a German's conception of American English:
Oh, show us the way to the next whisky-bar . . .
For if we don't find the next whisky-bar , . .
I tell you we must die— I tell you we must die . . .
Oh! Moon of Alabama
We now must say goodbye
We've lost our good old mama
And must have whisky
Oh, you know why!
* Originally called "Moritat" (literally, a murderous deed), a song style used by 17th and 18th century street-fair singers, who tearfully presented the latest atrocity in ballad form on the streets of Germany.