Immigration in Popular Culture

THE ARGENTINES, THE PORTUGUESE AND THE GREEKS

Click to start listening…

Aretha Franklin, Arlo Guthrie, Ruben Blades and Lila Downs have all recorded them: American songs about immigration are as old as America itself. Sometimes sympathetic, sometimes barbed, sometimes something in between: Together they tell the story of the American experience.

In this upbeat recording from 1920, “The Argentines, the Portuguese and the Greeks,” singer Nora Bayes poked fun at the perceptions of the then-new crop of immigrants. Bayes (born Goldberg) was a popular songwriter and performer. Her five marriages and mysterious background (even her friends did not know where she was born) helped make her, according to one friend, “entrancing, exasperating, generous, inconsiderate—a split personality; a fascinating figure.”

Here, she sings of a country both founded by, and inundated with, immigrants — and anxiously so. Not only do “they” sell your newspapers and shine your shoes, they also take up seats on the subway, drive the most expensive cars, and win the hearts of the loveliest girls. And though they “don’t know the law,” when it comes to singing patriotic songs, it is the Argentines, the Portuguese and the Greeks that know all the words.