Born: 17 October 1920, United States
Died: 22 November 2014
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Clara Bagelman
The following is republished from the Library of Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
The Barry Sisters was a popular Jewish-American vocal group whose careers spanned from the late 1930s through the early 1970s. They were born Minnie and Clara Bagelman and made their first recordings for Victor Records in the late 1930s, leading them to gain popularity as Yiddish jazz singers. The sisters changed their names to the Americanized stage names Merna and Claire Barry before joining songwriter and musician Sam Medoff’s WHN radio program Yiddish Melodies in Swing. They regularly sang jazz and popular tunes in Yiddish on the radio program from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s.
The Barry Sisters performed in New York’s Catskills’ largely Jewish resort hotels, as well as in Miami Beach and other areas with large Jewish communities. Later in their careers, they toured with musician and comedian Mickey Katz and made television appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jack Paar Program, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Ed Sullivan invited the Sisters to tour in the Soviet Union during the Cold War in 1959, creating a Russian fan basethat smuggled their records into the Soviet Union. The sisters also performed for Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Merna Barry died in 1976 at age 53, and Claire Barry died in 2014 at age 94.