Fastest Accordion in the West : ‘Jewish Cowboy of Encino’ Rides High on Borsch Trail

John Wayne is a memory, Gene Autry owns a baseball team and Hopalong Cassidy rode into the sunset long ago.

But that doesn’t mean the cowboy entertainer is obsolete.

One highly individualistic, if suspect, example of the breed is Israeli-born Shalom Sherman, who wears silver-colored cowboy boots and says Lawrence Welk is his professional idol.

Sherman, a one-man Borsch Belt variety show, bills himself as the Jewish Cowboy of Encino. He plays the accordion, tells a few jokes and sings, tapping into the cowboy identification by belting out such all-American favorites as “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” in Yiddish. He conceived his Jewish cowboy persona while working as a camp counselor in the West Texas hill country 15 years ago.

Plenty of Variety

These days, he says, he makes a full-time career performing on TV, in movies and at “engagements, disengagements, weddings, one-night stands, divorces, escrow closings, foreclosures, garage sales, bankruptcies, bar mitzvahs, passing the bar, house-warming parties and house parties without warmth.”

Aside from his title, his boots, his cowboy hat and a grab-bag of Western-flavored songs, the cowboy side of him is little more than a Jewish joke.

“You don’t think I’m being all serious, do you? A Jewish boy is not supposed to grow up to be a cowboy, but a lawyer or a doctor or maybe a pharmacist,” said Sherman, 36, his thickly rolled r-r-r-r sounding like a trailer truck grinding uphill in low gear. “I got this idea in Kerrville, Tex., where I saw real cowboys and a real rodeo. I think I was the first Jew they ever saw. They looked at me like I was a UFO.”

The brush-painted title, “Jewish Cowboy of Encino,” arcs across the back of a kaleidoscopically colorful jacket that is the key part of his uniform. He’s also the “Jewish Cowboy of Beverly Hills,” and has another jacket just in case anyone doubts it. Covering other geographical contingencies, he owns a third jacket with a painted sign declaring him to be the “Jewish Cowboy of the San Fernando Valley.”

‘Enjoy Today’

“My philosophy is to enjoy today to the utmost, put a smile on your face even if you begin crying,” he said. “I want to make people happy.”

Smiling as you begin crying is more than Sherman’s personal philosophy. His style reflects the emotional cross-current that has always been a part of Yiddish entertainment.

“I performed a few times at a hotel in the Catskills,” he declared proudly, referring to the Borsch circuit, the Upstate New York resort area that has launched so many Jewish entertainers’ careers.

Sherman played an array of songs for an interviewer, switching from an Eastern European ballad to American gospel to “Glory, Hallelujah,” again in Yiddish. He sang as he stood in his Woodland Hills house, which is filled with old accordions, miniature pianos and other musical bric-a-brac.

“Let us all sing beautiful songs,” he sang in Yiddish before translating. “Let us all dance. . . .”

Proud of Film Role

So far, his career’s high point was his performance in the 1980 movie “Tell Me A Riddle.” His part was small, but it distilled the nostalgic spirit he exudes in his everyday role as Jewish-American minstrel. Tillie Olsen, who wrote the novella on which the movie was based, and director Lee Grant discovered him during Sherman’s performance at a Jewish community center in Venice.

The movie is about an elderly Jewish immigrant couple whose love surfaces after a lifetime of acrimony. The scene with Sherman takes place in a Jewish community center where the couple is attending a party. The woman, played by Polish actress Lila Kadrova, is jolted back into the past by the sight of Sherman, who plays an entertainer who sings a Yiddish song and weaves through the crowd of elderly people. There is a flashback and Kadrova’s character is a child again in Russia, dancing to the music of an accordion.

The music brings more flashbacks, and the sequence ends in a kind of dream sequence in which the accordion player and the child are dancing through a street of a small town toward a hazy horizon.

“For the ego, this was very good,” said Sherman, who said it was the best of the small parts he has had in several films.

He said he performed at a party for Dolly Parton in the Valley not long ago, singing “On the Road Again.” In Yiddish, of course. “Here I am with Dolly,” he says, pointing to a scrapbook photograph of himself, lanky and dark-haired, and the smiling blond country music star. He has other celebrity photos, including one with his arm around actress-comedian Goldie Hawn.

Still, the famous are less likely to call on Sherman than the kinds of patrons for whom a wedding or bar mitzvah is the lifetime pinnacle of celebrity. Sherman said he performs at between six and 10 birthdays, weddings and other private engagements a week. And although he said he makes a healthy living in the service of his bicultural muse, one walks away feeling certain that if you sat your grandmother down in front of him and gave him a dollar, he’d play and sing until she begged him to stop.

In a letter, a nursing home administrator told Sherman, “All those in attendance greatly appreciated your fine skill, not only as a musician, but also being able to involve the people.”

One person who is particularly happy with Sherman’s career is Sherman’s mother, whom he likes to say has nominated him the best entertainer in California. “I have an M.D. degree,” said Sherman. “Mama’s Delight.”

No scrapbook can match a video cassette recorder’s power to preserve performers’ past glories and caress an ego that survives on memories. As he popped cassettes into his VCR, Sherman watched himself on his television screen with childlike wonder.

Spots on Talk Show

“See? There I am. They brought me in to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Steve Edwards on his show,” he said, pointing at the screen. “You’re going to love this.”

He said he has made five appearances on TV with Edwards, a daytime talk show host on KABC-TV. Most of his appearances on the show were part of a feature in which the program stages a surprise birthday or anniversary party for a relative or friend of a viewer. On those occasions, Sherman and his accordion traveled to the celebrant’s place of employment--a factory in one instance, a store in another--to do the televised honors. He tells jokes on these occasions, but they are generally of the rubber-chicken caliber. “Marriage is like a hot shower,” he told one man who was celebrating a wedding anniversary. “After you get used to it, it isn’t so hot.”

He said he has been on The Dating Game nine times, but never got the woman. One of his videotapes shows him as an irreverent and somewhat overbearing Bachelor No. 1. Another tape is of his appearance on The Gong Show, where he worked his way through a medley of Yiddish and American songs without being gonged.

Sherman also has done commercials. An example opens with him sitting on a patio chair singing, “If I Were a Rich Man,” which he interrupts for a pitch: “Ladies and gentlemen, you don’t have to be rich to afford this furniture. . . . “

Birthday Present

Growing up in Jerusalem, Sherman got his first accordion on his 10th birthday and began performing soon afterward. He traveled to Toronto in 1969 to study music, and it was during a snowy night there, on Jan. 14, 1969, that he had the experience he said changed his life. He first saw the Lawrence Welk Show.

“I will never forget the night,” Sherman said. “I loved what he did on that show. I love champagne music. That’s when I decided to come to Hollywood. I came that year.”

He seems to have memorized Welk’s life story. “He started out playing the accordion, just like me,” said Sherman. “He came here to Hollywood from South Dakota and I came from Israel. I think he is wonderful.”

He said he never auditioned for the Lawrence Welk Show because he thought the program was “too middle-America” for him. But that hasn’t stopped Sherman from building a career on his own, and he said it is expanding.

“Next, I am planning to go to Japan in April and I’m going to perform on a variety show for foreigners. I think they’ll like me in Tokyo.”