How many bar mitzvahs do you imagine George Clinton attended as a black kid in 1950s Plainfield NJ? Maybe a surprising number, I dunno. Did he happen to know the songwriter Jeff Barry, aka Joel Adelberg, also from Plainfield, who was only a few years older than George? Or was it perhaps a bar mitzvah for a colleague’s child that he attended or played at as a musician later in his adulthood? What Jewish folk song is the Flash Light melody even from? My ex-girlfriend from Israel who is a world-class pianist and who has been to countless Jewish parties didn’t recognize the melody.
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The Wikipedia article on Flashlight references a November 1993 interview by Vernon Reid from The Vibe Q: Raw and Uncut.
It’s a Jewish Bar Mitzvah chant of a friend of mine. “Da da da dee da da da.” There was a whole lot more to it. I just took that part of it 'cause it was a long thing.
Aaron Myron, he went to my grade school. I never forgot it.
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I should have checked Wikipedia’s endnotes, my bad, thank you for doing that. Can’t yet find any reference online to any Aaron Myron (or even Aaron Myran) in his early 80s. You’d think there’d be some census or phonebook result, but I got nothing so far. That’s one hell of an origin story for that melody, George Clinton circa 1953/1954 at a white Jewish classmate’s bar mitzvah. You’d think somebody in the music journalism world would have already found it irresistible to investigate.
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Yeah, assuming it was not improvised, it would be cool to find the original song, similar to how Groovallegiance draws from Los Marcianos.
In relation to his classmate, someone who has an Ancestry account or something similar could try to look up some school records.
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