Ben Bernie

Ben Bernie (1891-1943) was an American jazz violinist and radio personality. He was born Bernard Anzelevitz in Bayonne, New Jersey. By the age of 15 he was teaching violin, but this experience apparently diminished his interest in the violin for a time. He returned to music doing vaudeville, appearing with Phil Baker as "Baker and Bernie", but met with little success until 1922. In that year, he joined his first orchestra and would later have his own band called "The Lads." Bernie appeared with his band in the early DeForest Phonofilm sound short Ben Bernie and All the Lads (1924-1925), featuring pianist Oscar Levant. He toured with Maurice Chevalier and also toured in Europe. Bernie's orchestra recorded prolifically during the 1920s and 1930s, mainly for Vocalion and Brunswick

In 1925 Ben Bernie and his orchestra did the first recording of Sweet Georgia Brown, a tune of which Bernie was co-composer, and which became a jazz standard. Today it is also known as the theme song of the Harlem Globetrotters.

By 1929 things had declined. He became destitute during the Great Depression. A few years later he became a radio personality noted for using the word "yowsah" (also spelled "yowsa" or "yowza"). He is generally credited with originating the term, often used in quick succession.[1] [2] The term was revived by the band Chic in 1977 with their hit "Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)".[3]

His successful network radio career included two weekly radio programs, under the titles Ben Bernie, the Old Maestro and The Ben Bernie War Worker's Program, from 1931 through 1943, in addition to numerous other appearances as a guest on other shows.

This period also started his "rivalry" with Walter Winchell. Winchell was a major radio personality, as well as one of the most powerful newspaper columnists in the country specializing in gossip and entertainment news. He and Bernie, good friends, staged a long-running "feud" as part of the "schtick" of their radio programs to help build ratings (this was similar to the radio "feud" between Jack Benny and Fred Allen, best of friends in real life, of about the same period). This mutually beneficial "conflict" was not only a running gag on their radio appearances, but also in two films they made together in which both played themselves: Wake Up and Live (1937) and Love and Hisses (1937) .

Ben Bernie was noted for always having a cigar in hand and some speculate this hastened his death in 1943.

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