“My Sister and I” by Jimmy Dorsey

At #1: June 7, 1941; June 28, 1941 (two non-consecutive weeks)
Still alive? No. Jimmy Dorsey died on June 12, 1957

No, this is not the song by Haylie Duff. This song was written before Haylie’s mother was a gleam in someone’s eye. “My Sister and I” was sung by Bob Eberly and written by three songwriters: Hy Zaret, Joan Whitney and Alex Kramer. It’s far from a happy song, being the first-person story of a war refugee and his sister.

We’re learning to forget the fear
That came from a troubled sky
We’re almost happy over here
But sometimes we wake at night and cry

My sister and I recall the day
We said goodbye and then we sailed away
And we think of our friends who had to stay
But we don’t talk about that.

(It might actually be “her sister” according to the obituary for Hy Zaret in the New York Times, but with Bob Eberly singing you can’t be blamed for being confused.)

From the end of the 1930s right up to the World War America was in the middle of a refugee crisis. America was just coming out of a Great Depression – one could argue that we were still in one as of 1941 – and didn’t want the labor competition that an open immigration policy would bring. However, there were thousands of refugees attempting to escape the threat of Nazi persecution.

Just two years earlier, the refugee ship MS St. Louis which carried 930 Jewish German refugees (and seven non-Jewish) sought asylum in Cuba. The United States could not convince Cuba to provide asylum and refused to provide it themselves, the Coast Guard following the ship around Florida to make sure that it didn’t dock. Eventually, some European countries were convinced to take the passengers as refugees – countries which would soon fall under Nazi domination themselves.

Six hundred twenty passengers would end up in continental Europe. (Great Britain accepted some of the refugees. Of those, 254 would die at the hands of the Nazi killing machine.

Most American were opposed to entering World War II. According to a website of the Constitutional Rights Foundation:

On the eve of World War II, a bill that would have admitted Jewish refugee children above the regular quota limits was introduced in Congress. President Roosevelt took no position on the bill, and it died in committee in the summer of 1939. Polls at the time indicated that two-thirds of Americans opposed taking in Jewish refugee children.

So I find it interesting that this song poked its head up and brought the refugee problem back to America’s attention. The song doesn’t say what sort of refugees the children are, although the song says that they remember “a tulip garden by an old Dutch mill”.

I’m certain that Hyman Harry Zaritsky – the future Hy Zaret – was quite aware of the refugee problem. He himself was the son of immigrants from Russia. He was a socially conscious writer who not only wrote the massive hit “Unchained Melody” but also wrote educational songs. I was surprised to find that one of the songs he co-wrote with Lou Singer was “Why Does the Sun Shine?” better known as “The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas”, a song later performed by They Might Be Giants. (The Zaret-Singer version is slower; the version by They Might Be Giants made the song popular.)

So in a way, “My Sister and I” is not only the first “consciousness raising” #1 song, but is also the first war song to hit #1 – even though war was five months away. If two thirds of Americans didn’t want any refugees in 1939, opinions might have been turning two years later.

Extra: TMBG and “Why Does The Sun Shine?” co-written by the author of “My Sister and I”.