Sixty-seven years ago today, a New York radio station pulled “Mack the Knife” off the air.
The lyric was the problem. The song came out of the theater. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht wrote it for their 1928 musical The Threepenny Opera, where it works as a moritat, a murder ballad sung aloud to a crowd about a killer named Macheath. After a run of stabbings in the city that summer, the station banned every recording of it. Not only Bobby Darin‘s. All of them.
It was not the last time radio would do that to a hit, as Foreigner and the Police both found out twenty years later.
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It Was Never Built to Be a Pop Song
Darin picked it up from a 1958 production of The Threepenny Opera in Greenwich Village and worked it into his nightclub act. He kept the menace in the words and put a finger-snapping big band behind them. That mismatch is the whole record. It is also why a German stage number about a murderer, written three decades earlier, went to No. 1 in both the U.S. and the U.K.
Twelve Weeks Later It Won Record of the Year
The ban did not slow it down. If anything it did what radio bans usually do and sent people looking for the record. On Nov. 29, 1959, at the second Grammy Awards, “Mack the Knife” took Record of the Year. Darin won Best New Artist the same night. He was 23.
The Library of Congress Keeps It Now
In 2015 the Library of Congress added Darin’s single to the National Recording Registry, its permanent list of recordings judged culturally or historically significant. Louis Armstrong‘s 1956 version of the same song went in that year too.
A New York station spent one September deciding the song was too violent to play. The Library of Congress now preserves two recordings of it.
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