On December 19, 1958, singer Bobby Darin made the unusual decision to record his version of the theme song for The Threepenny Opera, a German musical play that debuted in 1928, for his upcoming album, That’s All. Not everyone agreed with Darin’s move. According to legend, Dick Clark warned Bobby Darin not to include the theme song. Since the tune was initially penned for an opera, it would be a turn-off to Darin’s rock and roll fans. Darin didn’t listen. The song he recorded, “Mack the Knife”, became a number one hit for Bobby Darin and a classic standard from the 1950s. The song, however, has a strange backstory.
Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife”, which was released as a single in August 1959, hit the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and was one of the biggest hits of the year. Darin won two Grammy Awards for the song, one for Record of the Year for 1959 and the other for Best New Artist.
This version of the song, however, is quite different from the original theme song in The Threepenny Opera, a musical play that was adapted from earlier sources. The Threepenny Opera, written by Bertolt Brecht, was a modern retelling of an 18th century opera by John Gay called The Beggar’s Opera. That opera was based on wandering minstrel ballads about a notorious English criminal named Macheath, or Mack the Knife. Composer Kurt Weill wrote the music for The Threepenny Opera and Brecht penned the lyrics. The Threepenny Opera made its debut on August 31, 1928, in Berlin.
Just before the show opened, however, the show’s lead actor, Harald Paulsen, who was cast to play Macheath, asked Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht to write another song for the show. He felt that there needed to be a musical number to effectively introduce his character and set up his backstory. Weill and Brecht agreed and hastily wrote a new song. Rather than have Paulsen’s Macheath sing it, they gave the tune to a wandering minstrel character who sang it in a traditional manner in the opening scene of the opera. The original lyrics, like the Bobby Darin version, likens Macheath to a vicious shark, but lists his lengthy criminal history, which included murder, robbery, arson, rape, stabbings, and extortion.
More than 25 years after the debut of The Threepenny Opera, jazz great Louis Armstrong came across the show’s theme song, “Mack the Knife.” He recorded an instrumental version of the song, as well as a vocal version, but he tweaked the lyrics and removed a few of Macheath’s more heinous crimes. When Armstrong released the song, many radio stations refused to play it. They claimed that “Mack the Knife” glorified criminal activity. Despite this, Armstrong’s version of “Mack the Knife” reached the number 20 spot on the Billboard Chart in the spring of 1956.
It was Bobby Darin’s rendition of “Mack the Knife” that really thrust the tune into the spotlight. Like Armstrong before him, Darin tried to sanitize the lyrics to make them more acceptable to the general public, while still keeping the dark theme and jazzy upbeat tune. Plus, he added a few “babes” and “dears” to soften the blow. This time around, the public was more accepting of the song. In fact, they loved it.
“Mack the Knife” became one of Bobby Darin’s signature songs and he performed it often in his concerts. As for Dick Clark, who tried to convince Darin not to record the song, he later apologized to Darin and admitted that “Mack the Knife” was a song that had more bite to it than he initially thought.