Bobby Darin – "Mack the Knife" (1959)

Jenny Diver, Sukey Tawdry

Miss Lotte Lenya, and old Lucy Brown

Music critic David Cheal has described “Mack the Knife” as “a song about a cold-blooded serial murderer written by a Marxist playwright and a leftwing composer for a musical that aimed to lay bare the hypocrisies of bourgeois morality [and] went on to become a huge commercial success globally.”

In his 1955 recording of “Mack the Knife,” Louis Armstrong turned what had been a very dark and dirge-like song into a finger-snapping, toe-tapping ditty. 

Armstrong’s English-language version of “Mack the Knife” included an ad-libbed shout-out to Lotte Lenya, who was present in Columbia Records’ New York City studio while Armstrong was recording it.  

Lotte Lenya

Lenya was the widow of “Mack the Knife” composer Kurt Weill and a featured performer not only in the original German production of The Threepenny Opera – the avant-garde musical whose opening number was “Mack the Knife” – but also in the off-Broadway production of the play.

She won a Tony for her portrayal of Jenny Diver, a prostitute and former lover of the notorious criminal Macheath – a/k/a/ “Mack the Knife.”  The lyrics to the song mention Jenny and three of the other female low-lifes in The Threepenny Opera, but Armstrong substituted “Miss Lotte Lenya” for one character’s name.

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Bobby Darin recorded “Mack the Knife” three years after Armstrong did.  His cover also mentions Lotte Lenya.

Darin’s first two hits were a novelty song (“Splish Splash”) and a typical teenage love song (“Dream Lover”).  Dick Clark thought he was barking upon the wrong tree with “Mack the Knife” because it came from an opera, and so wouldn’t appeal to the teen audience.

Clark couldn’t have been wronger.  “Mack the Knife” went to #1 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1959 and stayed there for nine weeks.  It sold two million copies, and won the “Best Record of the Year” Grammy to boot.

I vividly remember hearing Darin’s version on the radio when I was a kid.  I had no idea what the song was about, but I thought it was just about the coolest thing I had ever heard.  It was head and shoulders above the other songs being played on top-40 radio than.

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Bobby Darin was born Walden Robert Cassotto in New York City in 1936.  The inspiration for his stage name came from a malfunctioning neon sign at a Chinese restaurant that had “MANDARIN” in its name – the first three letters of the sign weren’t working, leaving only “DARIN” illuminated.

Bobby Darin

Darin’s mother got pregnant with him when she was 17.  To conceal the fact that he was born out of wedlock, his grandmother and mother passed him off as his mother’s little brother.  Darin didn’t learn who his real mother was until he was 32 and thinking about getting into politics.  (Darin never knew who his father was.  His mother took that secret with her to the grave.)

Darin had rheumatic fever when he was a young boy, which weakened his heart.  When he was 35, surgeons implanted two artificial valves into his heart.  A couple of years later, he developed a serious systemic infection after failing to take antibiotics before a routine visit to the dentist, which caused additional damage to his heart.  He died at age 37 after open-heart surgery in December 1973. 

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Click here to listen to “Mack the Knife.”

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