Blitzstein working on the film, Valley Town. The machine to his left is a "moviola." Photographer unknown. Click to enlarge.

"The Nickel Under the Foot" is one of the most important songs in the history of the American theatre, and of American labor. The spoken, then sung monologue of a prostitute, it was written by Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) in 1935 and played & sung by him for the German poet/playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) in January 1936. The occasion was a party at the Manhattan apartment of Blitzstein and his wife Eva Goldbeck, who had translated writings of Brecht that appeared in the NY Times, New Masses, and the Daily Worker.

Brecht had only just completed his parable, The Roundheads and the Pointedheads, an indictment of Hitler's racist rise to power that began as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, blended with allusions to Kleist, Swift, and Zola, and 14 songs with music by Hanns Eisler, including, most memorably, "Nannas Lied," also a song of a prostitute. Why not, Brecht suggested, write a whole show around that character, showing that everyone sells out under capitalism - "the press, the church, the courts, the arts - the whole system."

Months later, after Eva's death, Blitzstein took him up on it. The Cradle Will Rock, completed in 1936 and dedicated "to Bert Brecht," became Blitzstein's most performed work - second only to his 1952 translation/adaptation of the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera which would break all previous records for numbers of performances in 1954-1961 and establish both Off-Broadway and the reputations of Brecht and Weill in America.

The story of Cradle's stormy opening, when the government tried to stop it, padlocking the Maxine Elliott Theatre, and the actors and audience marched 20 blocks to the vacant Venice Theatre, has been told best by Blitzstein himself on the 1956 Spoken Arts LP SPA 717, "Marc Blitzstein discusses his theater compositions," and is also featured in the second volume of producer John Houseman's autobiography, Run-Through (1972) and Tim Robbins' 1999 film Cradle Will Rock.

Following the first public performance of Cradle, June 16, 1937, which was billed as a "concert," in which he was the only official performer on stage - (most of) the actors having performed their parts from the auditorium - he joined Actors' Equity, Musicians' Local 802, and the Dramatists' Guild, all on the same day.

Philip Barr, in his 1939 article "Opera in the Vernacular" in the Magazine of Art, called Cradle "the American opera that many of us have waited for." He pointed out the similarity of "Nickel Under the Foot" to the folk-song "Frankie and Johnny," except that the tonality side-slips a half-tone up and then down again, in a manner similar to Prokofiev as later emulated by Leonard Bernstein, in a style Barr called "so different... as to become his [Blitzstein's] own by inalienable right." Harry Levin in 1969 called it Blitzstein's "most Brechtian song," while Elie Siegmeister wrote in 1973 that it "could have been written by no other composer." British composer Alan Bush, creator of Joe Hill and other operas, told this writer in 1971, in Leningrad, "'The Nickel Under the Foot' is the finest blues ever written."

Olive Stanton

There have been over 100 productions of Cradle, most of them with piano, along with numerous stand-alone concert performances of this song. We know the names of 55 people (4 men and 51 women) who have performed it, 21 of whom have been recorded singing it.

The first was Gladys Frankel, who sang the song as part of a scene Blitzstein titled "Sketch No. 1," on a Feb. 23, 1936 concert by The Composers' Collective of NY, presented by The New Theatre League. Then on June 16, 1937, Olive Stanton,* as the Moll in Cradle, courageously took director Orson Welles' "suggestion" that she stand up and sing from the audience, when Actors Equity forbade the performers opening night from appearing onstage, and others then followed her example.

Then came Lorna Sharron; Lucille Colbert; Mira Gilbert (who would later co-star in an entire Blitzstein revue called Blitzstein!); Kate Shaffmaster; Shirley "Mann" (Bernstein) - Leonard Bernstein's 17-year-old sister who appeared in his undergraduate Harvard production under a pseudonym, avoiding any claims of violating the "Mann Act" (Blitzstein begged her to record it, but she never did); Edythe Young; Charles Robbins; Estelle Loring (in the 1947 orchestral premiere, conducted by Bernstein at City Center, and the Mansfield Theater); Muriel Smith (the first Carmen Jones); Rosalind Rapchik; Nita Leader; Lotte Lenya (Kurt Weill's widow who starred in Threepenny Opera, in a concert at Brandeis); Evelyn Lear* (who recorded the work with Blitzstein on the aforementioned Spoken Arts LP); Tammy Grimes* (at NY City Opera, an actress suggested to Blitzstein by Lotte Lenya).

Since Blitzstein's untimely death in 1964, there have been Barbara Harris* (in a memorial concert accompanied at the piano by Leonard Bernstein); Reed Wolcott (a student of Blitzstein at Bennington who organized a memorial tribute to him); Lauri Peters* (at Theatre Four on MGM, later CRI, accompanied by Gershon Kingsley); Paula Hajar* (at Harvard); Katya Brous* (also at Harvard); Jane Milne; Robin Skeie; Ann Ainsworth; Arden Lewis; Martha Schlamme; Patti LuPone* (accompanied by Michael Barrett); Marni Nixon* (accompanied by Steven Blier at Merkin Hall); Karen Holvik* (also accompanied by Steven Blier on Koch); Helene Williams* (accompanied by Leonard Lehrman on Original Cast); Eric Gordon (accompanied by Leonard Lehrman, and others); Spider Saloff; Sandra Terry*; Kathleen Cuvelier*; Julie Janney; Ysobel Gonzalez; Emily Watson* (in Tim Robbins' film); Polly Jean Harvey* (in the film's end credits); Richard Lalli (at Joe's Pub); Victoria Clark* (at Joe's Pub and Encores!); Elise Stone (at Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre); Melora Marshall; Victoria Thomas; Kate Starkweather; Sean McKelvey; Natalie Ford; Lars Woodul*; Jessica Moretti; JoElyn Wakefield* (accompanied by Leonard Lehrman at the National Opera Association convention); Amy X. Neuburg* (at the OtherMinds Festival in San Francisco); Catherine Walker* (at the Kennedy Center); Meredith Carman* (at Cornell); Dana Tretta; and Marina López Lazárraga (in Madrid, in Spanish).

Patti LuPone as "Moll"

Until July 2004 it was not known that Blitzstein had made a demo recording of the song himself, probably in 1938 when most of the Mercury Theatre production of Cradle was recorded and issued on 78s - the first original cast recording of any Broadway show. That composer demo was discovered by this writer in the Blitzstein Archives of the State Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin, where it had been misfiled for decades as part of the soundtrack by Blitzstein for the 1940 film, Valley Town. Said film score contains another Brechtian song - "How Long?"- which is similar in character to "Nickel," so it seems possible that he had played that demo for the actress portraying the role of the poverty-stricken wife in the film, and that the recording had thus been filed with materials from that work.

Other works by Blitzstein on labor themes include his setting of the poem "Into the Streets May First" (1934) by Alfred Hayes (author of "Joe Hill"); "First of May" (1935) on a poem by Eva Goldbeck; "Strike Song" (1935); the autobiographical radio song play I've Got the Tune (1937; released in Leonard Lehrman's 1970 adaptation on Original Cast Records in 2005); the labor opera No for an Answer (1941); and the work he considered would be his magnum opus, the 3-act opera Sacco and Vanzetti, commissioned by the Ford Foundation, optioned by the Metropolitan Opera, and completed by Leonard Lehrman in 2001.

* Artists who have recorded the song.

Notes by Leonard Lehrman, © 2006. Lehrman is the author of Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Bibliography (Praeger, 2005) and editor of The Marc Blitzstein Songbook, v. 1-3 (Boosey & Hawkes, 1999-2003), and a member of CSEA Local 882.

It was Tuesday last week, yeh, Tuesday
I had breakfast at Andy's--
Coffee-and; for lunch
I had coffee-and again;
For dinner I could only afford
Coffee. Then I looked on the floor,
And I see a nickel shinin there. Gee! (Steps on it.)
Coffee-and, Andy!
Then I looked closer--
That wasn't no nickel.
Not coffee-and, Andy, just coffee, Andy--cute, huh?
Mister, you don't know what it felt like,
Thinkin that was a nickel under my foot.

(She has been talking over music; now the tune carries her with it.)

Poster from the Federal Theatre Project, Work Projects Administration production of The Cradle Will Rock, 1937. Click to enlarge.

Maybe you wonder what it is,
Makes people good or bad;
Why some guy, an ace without a doubt,
Turns out to be a bastard,
And the other way about.
I'll tell you what I feel:
It's just the nickel under the heel....

Oh, you can live like Hearts-and-Flowers,
And every day is a wonderland tour.
Oh, you can dream and scheme
And happily put and take, take and put....
But first be sure
The nickel's under your foot.

Go stand on someone's neck while you're takin;
Cut into somebody's throat as you put--
For every dream and scheme's
Depending on whether, all through the storm,
You've kept it warm...
The nickel under your foot.

And if you're sweet, then you'll grow rotten;
Your pretty heart covered over with soot.
And if for once you're gay,
And devil-may-careless, and oh, so hot...
I know you've got
That nickel under your foot.

Order the Marc Blitzstein Centennial Concert CD from Original Cast Records.

Also on the CD: selections from Idiots First a one-act opera based on the tale of the same name by Bernard Malamud; Sacco and Vanzetti, a three-act opera Blitzstein considered would be his magnum opus; I've Got The Tune, an autobiographical radio song play; a series of solo settings of Whitman texts; and other songs. Some are recorded here for the first time. Some were unfinished at the time of Blitzstein's death by murder, and were completed by Leonard Lehrman, who with Bruce Yeko produced the CD.

Personnel on Nickel: Marc Blitzstein, piano and vocals; Da-Hong Seetoo, remastering; Blitzstein Archives of the State Historical Society in Madison Wisconsin, owner of original and very scratched 78 acetate.

The uncredited photo of Blitzstein is also at the Madison archive. The photo of Olive Stanton is from American Theatre Collection, George Mason University, reprinted in Tim Robbins' "Cradle Will Rock: The Movie and the Moment," NY: Newmarket Press, 2000, p. 79. The LuPone photo is a publicity shot.

Permission to post the song here has been graciously granted by Original Cast Records, Bruce Yeko, president; and Chappell, publishers of The Cradle Will Rock.