Pop group Jay And The Americans perform on the NBC TV music show ‘Hullabaloo’ in New York City, February 1965. Jay Black is second from right, holding the microphone. (Hullabaloo Archive\/Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
When he made the same point to The Forward, he added that he was subsequently tossed out of three yeshivahs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThree yeshivas,\u201d Black said twice for emphasis in a 2014 interview. \u201cI was a bad kid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Black, born David Blatt, died in Queens, New York, on Oct. 22 at 82, of cardiac arrest brought on by pneumonia.<\/p>\n
He was selling shoes in 1962 or 1963 at Thom McAn when a buddy, Marty Kupersmith, who knew Blatt from the Jewish doo-wop circuit, asked him to take the place of Jay Traynor, who had quit Jay and the Americans, a group that had scored a single hit in 1962.<\/p>\n
There was a condition: Blatt had to take on the first name Jay.<\/p>\n
There are differing accounts of how he got the name Black; there\u2019s evidence he was using it professionally before he joined Jay and the Americans, but he insisted he muttered \u201cJay Blatt\u201d when Mike Douglas, the daytime talk show host, asked him his name, and Douglas repeated \u201cBlack\u201d and it stuck.<\/p>\n
Black, raised in an Orthodox family, had sung as a youngster with the choir of Cantor Moshe Koussevitzky. He became known for his powerful reach-for-the-rafters voice and his dramatic delivery. Bandmates dubbed him \u201cThe Voice\u201d and it stuck.<\/p>\n
With his dark good looks and his operatic delivery, he affected a Latin persona; one of the band\u2019s most popular numbers was \u201cCara Mia,\u201d in which he pledges to his presumably Italian object of adoration that \u201cI will be your love until the end of time,\u201d escalating into a heart-stopping falsetto. The song peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.<\/p>\n
There were other hits: \u201cCome a Little Bit Closer\u201d (which peaked at #3 on the charts), about an encounter with a seductress in a Mexican border town that ends badly; and their cover of the Drifters\u2019 \u201cThis Magic Moment\u201d (peaked at #6). The group was big enough to open for the Beatles in 1964, at the Fab Four\u2019s very first U.S. concert.<\/p>\n
The band wore sweaters and were clean-cut, but Black liked to project a mysterious, bad-boy affect: he boasted of his friendship with the Mafia boss John Gotti, and in a 1994 profile refused to tell The New York Times what his name was before \u201cBlack\u201d \u2014 in fact, nothing in the long profile refers to his Jewishness. (He also made sure the reporter knew that female fans were, in his sixth decade, still delivering panties to him.)<\/p>\n
He toured across America for decades, but New Yorkers loved their native son best. He sported a flag on his jacket, and said he was proud of the band\u2019s 1963 hit, \u201cOnly in America,\u201d recorded just when the counterculture was about to take off.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly in America can a guy from anywhere go to sleep a pauper and wake up a millionaire,\u201d he sang.
The group broke up in 1973, but Black continued to perform under \u201cJay and the Americans\u201d until 2005, when a chronic gambling habit drove him into bankruptcy. Debts forced him to sell back the name to three original founders of the group, who were ready to reunite and take the show on the road.<\/p>\n
The revived group let him continue performing as Jay Black, but he never quite forgave them for taking the band name from him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe shared both wonderful and very contentious times, and much like an ex-wife, we are so proud of the beautiful children we created,\u201d the group said Saturday on its Facebook page. \u201cWe\u2019ll always remember The Voice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taking his place fronting the band is a younger guy named John Reincke, who is now known as Jay.<\/p>\n
Jay Black, thrice-married and thrice-divorced, is survived by three sons, a daughter and five grandchildren.<\/p>\n
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