…when Mackie’s back in town? I know the song Mack the Knife is from the Threepenny Opera and it’s always been my favorite pop song about a serial killer but the verse about Jenny Diver, Sukey Tawdry, Miss Lotte Lenia, and ol’ Lucy Brown and the phrase “that line forms on the right babe now that Mackie’s back in town” stymies me. Are these women serial killer groupies or something? WTF? I’ve looked around for an annotated version but nobody has deciphered it like American Pie.
BTW Brian Setzer’s album Vavoom! has a terrific version of the song.
The Jenny Diver is probably Pirate Jenny from the original song. Lotte Lenya starred in a famous production of Threepenny Opera. I think the Bobby Darin version has just been made more “accessible.”
I’m sure there must be a Kurt Weill fan on this board.
[sub]Why do music questions arise when I am at work and the music stuff is at home?[/sub]
I am going by one English translation, from memory.
Jenny Diver, Suki Tawdry, Polly Peacham, and Lucy Brown were names for prostitutes (just as Margery Daw was also a common term for ‘prostitute’) and ‘friends’ of Mack. I have not seen a live performance of “Threepenny Opera” (our college did “The Beggar’s Opera” on which “TPO” was based, lo many years ago), but it is possible that they were also victims of Mack.
The Darin version was the ‘pop/jazz’ version and had nothing to do with the original song, the lyrics of which can get pretty gruesome - arson deaths of “sieben Kinder und ein Greis” (7 children and an old man), the raping of a widow, and various other crimes that Mackie may or may not have been connected to.
I remember hearing a version of the song on an episode of the “Ernie Kovacs Show” - “Mack the Knife” is quite dark and sinister if done well and correctly.
Screech & Bob have done the heavy lifting on this Q already; that is, that most of the the names in Darin’s loose and jazzy rendition refer to the prostitute characters in Threepenny Opera, the show from which Mack the Knife comes (… although Lucy Brown, IIRC, was policeman Tiger Brown’s daughter who may not have been a prostitute – but a Mack groupie nonetheless.)
Anyway, the tidbit I wanted to add was this. Lotte Lenya was more than just an actress who once played in TO; she was composer Kurt Wiell’s wife, too. After his death she doggedly kept his flame burning (and her career rolling) by performing his songs/shows.
Lucy Brown, Polly Peachum, and Jenny Diver were his “wives” in the play…
The first two were groupie like, and fought over him when he was alive, and fought over being called his widow once he had died. Diver was a prostitute in the story, and had long since gotten over him, but they’d stayed friends… (I think she dies. Its been a long while since I’ve seen it.)
The english version is much less gruesome than the German one.
stuyguy - thank you for correcting me on Lucy Brown - she was a ‘good girl gone to the bad side, depite her father being the upstanding policeman’, or something like that.
(Some how I backspaced over the sentence I wrote about Lenya being Weill’s wife: I KNEW that! Thanks for picking that up!)
And yes, the German version is a lot heavier and gruesome. NPR did news article (“All Things Considered” or “Weekend Edition”, something like that, about the different translations of TPO, especially a ‘new’ adaptation done in the 70s that failed to overwhelm the theatre world.
Wasn’t Polly also a good-girl-gone-bad? IIRC, her dad ran a slimy business - but made enough money that the daughter was supposed to have been kept a respectable citizen, above all of the rest of the crap?
Damnation! My CD of ‘TPO’ is missing!!!
Anyone want to send me a Christmas present? :mad:
Also, I am trying to find a copy of the score (in German) so I can answer my own questions about what I half-remember of this piece, and Amazon is of little help. Anyone have any suggestions for websites for musical scores?