My Cousin, The Late Jay Black

I Will Miss The Great Singer's Speaking Voice

My cousin Jay Black of Jay & the Americans died October 23, 2021, at age 82 in New York. I have some stories.

He wasn't born Jay. His birth name was David Blatt. In 1965, my friend Scot Brody and I were at the United Synagogue Youth of Conservative Judaism's convention in Washington, D.C. Scot was representing Jewish Community Center of West Hempstead, where my Bar-Mitzvah reception had been held two years earlier, at which Jay declined to sing. "If I do it for you, I'd have to do it for everyone," he waved at the assembled family members. I didn't understand it then, but for all of his boldness and outer machismo, cousin Jay was also very shy and anxious before he performed.

I was representing Shelter Rock JCC, where for strange reason I was chapter president. The strange reason was that nobody else wanted the job. We'd had no membership the year before when my parents made me go to the youth group hoping I would "find some friends" in the new neighborhood we had moved to. To stop my parents kvetching, I went, saw no one to talk to, and stood by the out-of-place jukebox playing the defiant, sour Rolling Stones' B-side "Congratulations," the song as sullen as I felt all the time. The college age youth group adviser took one look at me and said, "How would you like to be vice president?" I said OK. Whoever the president had been had left or graduated, so I was promoted to president. The next year, Shelter Rock JCC moved into a mammoth, modern new building adjacent to the small house where the youth group met, and membership boomed. I picked up an award at that USY convention for greatest membership improvement.

Saturday morning shabbas service was mandatory, so as Scot and I entered hotel's ballroom for services, I grabbed a "What's Happening This Weekend in Washington" pocket magazine. And what was happening was Jay & the Americans performing in the hotel nightclub right across the street from our hotel. After services, I called the hotel and asked for David Blatt. I was connected immediately. I told him where I was, and he said, come on over later and catch the show!

Scot and I went over, and my cousin waved us in to the room. "You should've come earlier, the hoo-iz [whores] just left, you coulda gotten laid," Jay said between pauses while he was on the phone. He waved for us to sit while he was on the phone while watching college basketball. "What's the St. Bonaventure score at halftime?" Jay said into the phone.

Scot and I were tickled that Jay was as obsessed with sports as we were. Even more obsessed, perhaps. We looked at each silently, like, "we love sports, but to care about the Saint Bonaventure score? What's up with that?" We realized soon enough that my cousin was on the phone with his bookie, and he was making parlays worth hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars a game, on the college basketball point spreads. It was a close-up look at his lifelong gambling addiction that hit a bottom of sorts when he put up his stage name for collateral, and lost the bet. He could no longer tour as Jay & the Americans; he had to be advertised as Jay, or Jay Black, "The Voice." When I interviewed Jay's contemporary Frankie Valli about eight years ago for a story about Jersey Boys on Broadway, he shook his head sadly when I told him Jay was my cousin. "Millions. He lost millions," to his gambling habit, Valli said.

At showtime, he led us down to the nightclub, where he told the maitre'd to take good care of us. Then came a scene directly out of the movie Goodfellas, in which the Ray Liotta character takes his girl to the Copacabana, and the waiters carry out a table and set it up in a VIP spot for the sold-out show. The waiter came for our drink order. "Scotch and soda" seemed a practical choice. We ate New York strip steaks, drank Scotch and sodas, and had a great time.

When we went back to our hotel, it was 11 pm, and everyone was supposed to be in their rooms. I don't know what Scot was feeling, but those drinks made me feel about a foot taller, and we were looking for girls, because for some reason, my shyness about approaching girls had evaporated through the application of whiskey. No one was around.

Jay's father and my grandmother on my father's side were brother and sister, the Blatt side of the family. He and my father were first cousins, making Jay and I First Cousins Once Removed (FCOR). Years back, when I told people that, some would might say there there is no such thing: That we might have been "second cousins." Now that geneology sites are all over the Internet, including Ancestry.com, the distinction is clear: the next generation of first cousins are FCOR.

In 1962, Jay & the Americans had a hit ballad called "She Cried," when I was in seventh grade. The Brooklyn/Queens group consisted of Jay Traynor, Sandy Yaguda, Kenny Vance, Marty Sanders, and Howie Kane. After "She Cried," Jay Traynor left the group. The other four guys could all sing well, but they knew they needed a powerful lead singer. My cousin, who could have been one of the great operatic cantors if he followed his family's Orthodox Judaism, joined the Americans and to suit the brand, changed his name to Jay Black.

A year later, they hit the charts with "Only in America," a song that Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had originally written for the Drifters. I'd never heard the Drifters version until a few weeks ago, when Fairleigh-Dickinson University's "Retro Radio," WFDU/89.1 in the New York metro area found it on a compilation. The legend has it that the Drifters, tuning in early to the fight for civil rights, knew that the "land of opportunity" promised in the songs lyrics did not apply to them. But it was the big break for Jay Black & the Americans.

Along with the Beach Boys and Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons, Jay & the Americans were one of the few American vocal groups to withstand the British Invasion: "Come a Little Bit Closer" (1964),  and wall-to-wall hits during 1965: "Let's Lock the Door (and Throw Away the Key)," "Some Enchanted Evening," "Sunday and Me," and the ornate "Cara Mia," that displayed the full power of Jay's Italianate voice.

"Cara Mia." That reminds me of another story. Jay told me he had been summoned to the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens, one Saturday morning. The so-called club was the front for the Gambino crime family headquarters, John Gotti chief executive officer.

Jay told me he was sitting in the outer office, scared out of his mind. He had no idea why Gotti asked him to the weekly meeting of the mob. Jay was a fabulous mimic and when he was finally ushered in, he said, Gotti spoke in his gravelly voice: "I'm sure youse all know Jay; he probably owes all of youse money." Everyone laughed except Jay. But then came the pitch: He asked Jay if he would honor him by singing "Cara Mia" at Junior Gotti's forthcoming wedding. And so he did.

Jay was a well-known friend of the Gotti family; at John Gotti's trial, the New York Post snapped a front page picture of Jay entering the courthouse with "Junior" Gotti and sitting in the reserved family row. I may have called him and said, "I think you need a new press agent," but Jay's relationship with the Gotti family went back to the old neighborhood in Brooklyn.

When I was at Newsday, I wrote a cover story for the Newsday Sunday magazine in 1991 called "My Cousin the Pop Star." There was one factual error--an editing error I should have caught in the final proofs, to which I hardly paid attention--that infuriated Jay, and he threw it in my face for quite a few years. In the story, I had presumed he had gone to a Jewish day school, a yeshiva, as a child. The gentile copy editor took this to mean Jay attended Yeshiva University. This presumption of higher education was like a personal affront.

He told me: "Listen. I got thrown out of New Utrecht High School [in Bensonhurt, Brooklyn]. They told me if they ever saw me again, they'd have me arrested."

This is the Jay that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker knew when one of their first jobs after Bard College was playing in Jay's backup band. There was no love lost. I called Jay to get a quote when I did my first Steely Dan feature for Newsday. "You mean Manson and Starkweather," was his comment.

And in an interview I did with Fagen and Becker for the Los Angeles Times in 2000, when they were promoting their Two Against Nature album, their first as Steely Dan in 20 years, I think they nailed my cousin's young life arc pretty well. "Jay went from 1950s juvenile delinquent to 1970s mafia without ever setting foot in the 1960s."

            Aside from getting his history in educational institutions wrong, Jay and I had a kind of touching mutual resentment. He expressed his quite humorously at a show at Westbury Music Fair. During my years at Newsday, it was verboten for me to review my relative's performances. In June 1990, my family and a bunch of friends went to see him and hung out before and after. When we sat down for the show, Jay made an announcement to the audience: A celebrated music critic, Wayne Robins from Newsday, was in the audience. The crowd neither applauded nor booed, but wondered what the point was. Jay told them, "But you're never going to see a review by him of my show, because he's my cousin." The audience still wasn't sure where he was going with this, so he got to the point: "I was at his circumcision," he said, the crowd now laughing. "And he knows if he ever wrote anything bad about me, I'd circumcise him again." The crowd roared.

            On my side, I always had a wish in the back of my head that I'd gone deeper into the music business, doing A&R for a record company, so I could sign and produce a Jay Black solo album, that would elevate his stature to that of one of the few singers he admitted admiring, Roy Orbison. (A version of Orbison's "Crying" was a 1966 hit for Jay & the Americans.) I thought with his voice, and black leather jacket with American flag sown on the back, that Nashville would be inviting. (Raul Malo of the Mavericks occupied the zone that Jay could have had.)

            I told this to Jay once, and he set me straight. When I was a teenager, he recalled, "You asked me for help getting into the record business; you wanted to be one of the whores," again using the regional pronunciation, "hooiz." "Now you don't have to be one of the hoo-iz; you get to write about the hoo-iz." And that's one thing I also respected about my cousin Jay Black/David Blatt, of blessed memory. He had his own stubborn code, and no one will ever be able to accuse him of being one of the hoo-iz.

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