Even if someone does a great impersonation of me, it’s still not me.” “I don’t know who’s going to be singing these songs. Black told Newsday after the court allowed him to keep his name. “Having an impostor group go out, that bothers me,” Mr. Although he won a battle to continue to perform under his name the next year, he could not prevent the court from auctioning off the name “Jay and the Americans” to one of the group’s founding members, Sandy Yaguda (known professionally as Sandy Deanne). He owed $500,000 in back taxes dating to 1993 because of his gambling addiction. Black landed in bankruptcy court in 2005. Douglas asked him his last name, he misheard “Blatt” as “Black,” and from then on he was Jay Black. Blatt did not become Jay Black until he appeared on Mike Douglas’s talk show. Black was selling shoes at Thom McAn at the time.Īlthough he had agreed to change his name to Jay, Mr. Marty Kupersmith, who performs as Marty Sanders, had been in both groups with him before becoming one of the Americans when Mr. Black began his singing career with two doo-wop groups, the Two Chaps and the Empires. When I graduated from eighth grade, I was the class comedian. “I was a bad kid,” he told The Forward in 2014. David first sang publicly in the choir at Temple Beth-El.īut he said he was thrown out of New Utrecht High School and three yeshivas. His parents, Herman and Francis (Smith) Blatt, brought him up in the Orthodox Jewish tradition.
2, 1938, in Astoria, Queens, and grew up in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I can’t sing.”ĭavid Blatt was born on Nov. “I’m not hitting any notes,” he said, explaining that he had not sung in more than a year. Black apologized to fans at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., for struggling to reach his former vocal heights. But in 2017, during one of his last performances, Mr.
That voice sustained him as a solo oldies act long after Jay and the Americans broke up in 1973.