My grandfather never said "What is it, fish" but he had the annoying habit, common to many Jewish grandfathers, of lecturing young 'uns about how wonderful the Jews are. He'd be likely to point out that Rodgers & Hart, Kern & Hammerstein, Harburg & Arlen and the Gershwin brothers were all Jews, even though some of them never saw the inside of a synogogue.
I know it bothered him that I never saw the inside of a synogogue, but my point was about Porter...
Someone of my grandfather's bent would point out that, although Porter was the only gentile of the great songwriters of his generation, when this was pointed out to him he answered that he sometimes imitated Jewish music while he composed.
The best example is probably My Heart Belongs To Daddy, with its cantorial ullulation (sp?) towards the end. I Love Paris certainly sounds as if it could be heard in a temple, and I've always been fond of Were Thine That Special Face, although I'm glad it ends in major. And that song Katz liked, Goodbye Little Dream Goodbye, may have reminded him of stuff he'd heard at his bar-mitzvah.
So, there's a culture war type reason to appreciate Porter's least Jewish compositions, the ones in which he's truest to his roots. I'm thinking of hits like Don't Fence Me In and Friendship but also an obscure ballad called
We're Only Another Boy and Girl
which ends,
But we'll God bless our break
Take a lot more time than our elders take
And make love's young dream come true.
I hope I'm not throwing a log on the flame of an overly-religion-concious fire when I say that these are lines a Jewish lyricist would be unlikely to come up with. Or, put another way, if you didn't know the song, and I asked you which one of the major songwriters penned it, some process of elimination would bring you to Porter, because "we'll God bless our break" could hardly be Hart, Fields or Harburg.
