Jack and Joseph Kammen Jack and Joseph Kammen were twin brothers, born Yakov and Yosef Kamenetzky in
Białystok,
Grodno Governorate,
Russian Empire (today located in
Poland) on October 11, 1888. They emigrated to the United States as children in 1894 or 1895 along with their parents Max and Hinda; the family became naturalized U. S. citizens in 1905. Their father worked as a musician in the United States; both Jack and Joseph as well as their younger brother Herman (Hyman) took it up as a career too. In 1910 Jack, Jacob and their brother Herman changed their names from Kamenetzky to Kammen. The brothers recorded at least one disc for
Emerson Records' Jewish series in around 1920, which consisted of them playing a piano duet of Russian and Jewish music. Jack Kammen died in New York in March 1969. It is unclear when Joseph died.
J. & J. Kammen Music Company The earliest Jewish music publishing house in the United States was Katzenelenbogen and Rabinowitz at the turn of the twentieth century, followed by a large number of other companies, including Theodore Lohr, Albert Teres, and the Hebrew Publishing Company. However, the company recovered and became even more successful by the end of the decade; the popularity of
Bei Mir Bistu Shein, which the Kammens had bought the rights to for $30 and sold to a subsidiary of
Warner Bros., caused a boom in adaptations of Jewish music for popular audiences, and a huge increase in sales for the company. During the 1930s and 1940s the Kammens filed a number of lawsuits to protect their songs from infringement; one suit against
T. B. Harms in 1935 claimed the popular song
Isle of Capri was derivative of a
Nellie Casman song they owned called . A 1940 suit against
Edward B. Marks and
RCA claimed that the popular song
Bublichki was an infringement of their 1929 song ; it was eventually settled. And a 1948 suit claimed that
Nature Boy infringed the copyright of their song "Be Still my Heart", which had been written by Herman Yablokoff. After the death of the brothers, J. & J. Kammen seems to have ceased publication by the 1970s. ==Selected publications==