Summary
The Brecht/Weill song Mack The Knife first appeared in The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928.
Sung about the criminal MacHeath, the 'play with music' is based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, who was inspired by the real-life English highwayman, Jack Sheppard.
The song became a hit when performed in 1959 by Bobby Darin.
Ella Fitzgerald famously forgot the words when performing live in Berlin in 1960, and her improvised version won a Grammy.
Suzi Quatro talks about how she performed it with her father as a child, playing bongos to accompany him.
Lenny Kaye from the Patti Smith Group recalls how he and Patti did a version of 'Mack The Knife' at their first ever performance together at St Marks Church in New York on 10th February 1971, as it was Brecht's birthday.
Film-maker Malcolm Clark tells the story of the song's first public performer, Kurt Gerron, an actor and director, who took the song into the darkest places of the Third Reich.
Contributors:
Stephen Hinton Stephen Parker Jane Tipping John Bird Malcolm Clarke Lenny Kaye Suzi Quatro
Series about pieces of music with a powerful emotional impact.
Producer: Sarah Conkey
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2015.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My name is Jane Tipping. I was born in 1951 and for the first 10 years of my life, I lived in |
| 0:07.3 | Pinner in Middlesex, in a detached suburban house with my sister, who's three years younger than me, |
| 0:14.4 | and my mother and my father. And my father was a B OAC pilot and so he used to fly a lot to America. |
| 0:24.4 | He used to bring back all sorts of wonderful things that you couldn't possibly buy in this country. |
| 0:31.5 | The suitcase that he used to have was a big blue suitcase called a globe trotter. |
| 0:39.1 | And everything inside the suitcase was cold, because obviously the air pressure. |
| 0:44.5 | And he'd opened the suitcase. |
| 0:45.9 | And my sister and I absolutely adored paper dolls. |
| 0:50.5 | They were the Lennon sisters, Connie Francis, Heavenly Blue Wedding, |
| 0:56.0 | it's 1950s cardboard dolls that we used to cut out. |
| 1:00.0 | At the bottom of his suitcase, there were the paper dolls and the LPs, |
| 1:05.0 | which were just stacked flat right at the bottom of the suit case. |
| 1:08.0 | Oh, the sharp baby has such teeth death, |
| 1:14.4 | and it shows them pearly white, |
| 1:19.7 | just a jackknife has old maggie heap, baby, |
| 1:25.8 | and it keeps it out of sight. |
| 1:30.3 | You know when that's father brought back this small EP. |
| 1:34.3 | And it had a picture of Bobby Darren on the front, |
| 1:39.3 | and he put that on and started singing to it. |
| 1:42.3 | And it seemed so different and so cool. |
| 1:48.0 | So there's never a trace of red. |
| 1:53.0 | My parents would light up their cigarettes |
... |
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