Everyone in the music industry started out at some point, and yes, as all of us were all children once
Many of today’s popular performers got an early push into the industry, starting out when they were just kids, although at the time, most of them never realized it was a foreshadowing of what was yet to come. (Can you recognize the kids in the pictures?)
Shloime Dachs got his first job was when he was just eight years old, and he’ll never forget it — it was the first time he was actually paid to sing. A year before, he’d joined seventh and eighth graders in the Yeshivah Torah Vodaath school choir, and he would become a concert soloist with Tzlil V’Zemer, Amudai Shaish, and Miami Boys Choir. But when he was hired by Cheryl Knobel and Rivkah Neumann to sing on 613 Torah Avenue (can you recall the song “It’s Time to Learn Torah Right Now”?), he was paid a whopping $125 — his first-ever check. I wonder if he ever cashed it….
Simcha Leiner studied nusach with Chazzan Sherwood Goffin a”h, so that he could daven on his bar mitzvah day. People knew he came from a musical family, especially from knowing his uncle Rabbi Berel Leiner (longtime menahel of YBH of Passaic, who sang on JEP recordings in the 1970s). When the people found out that he was going to be the chazzan that day, they all packed into his shul, even without being invited, to hear him daven for the amud. That was the very first time he sang publicly. And we know the end of the story….
Before his bar mitzvah, Nachum Segal and a friend formed a duo during lunch, called “Lechem Mishneh,” and they would do brief sports announcements in the school cafeteria during lunch hour. Even the teachers would come by to hear his reports — an obvious precursor to his longstanding radio career.
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