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| A final tribute to a massive ego. |
Al Jolson was a massive presence of the 1920s, which makes it hard to know where to begin with him. One could mention him starring in the first “talkie” - 1927’s The Jazz Singer, of course, a role that, though not written for him, seemed tailor-made to his real-life story. There’s also his years-long use of blackface, the odious 19th century artistic relic that he carried to new heights in the 20th century. As an essay posted to Ferris University’s website put it:
“If blackface has its shameful poster boy, it is Al Jolson. Many other 20th-century performers from Shirley Temple to Bing Crosby donned the makeup for various roles, but Jolson adopted it as a core part of his public persona.”
After a little reading and a lot of thought, calling him America’s first rock star best translates Al Jolson for a modern audience: several times larger than life, consumed by ego, and burning bridges all the way. They made a movie called The Jolson Story in 1947, but his personal history would have posed one hell of a challenge to making Jolson sympathetic.
Jolson was born Asa Yoelson circa 1886 in Seredzius, Kovno Governate, Russian Empire, aka, what is now Lithuania. Because Russia wasn’t the gentlest place for Jews (pogroms, etc.), his father Moses Yoelson, a rabbi and a cantor, made arrangements to relocate to the U.S., first on his own to get settled then to send for his family. (The best source for this period was a site called Musicals 101; just to note it, you’ll learn more from their four-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) than you will reading this.) His wife Naomi brought over Asa and his three siblings - two sisters, Rose and Etta (both bit players in his story) and his older brother Hirsch (highly relevant) - and the family planted roots in Washington D.C…for as long as Naomi kept them planted. Jolson’s mother died when he was 10, an event that, by every account I read, shattered Jolson; as Musical 101 puts it, “Jolson, for all his tough, earthy exterior, would remain an emotional child for the rest of his life.”
Despite Moses Yoelson’s dreams that both boys would follow him into the family business, they were busking on DC street corners as early as 1897; they even Americanized their names to Harry and Al. When Harry moved to New York to get into show business, Al ran away to join him (they both ran away a lot, as it happened); the ragtime bug had bit them both. Wikipedia’s history of Jolson mentions some time spent in the circus, but the Jolson brothers eventually teamed up to form a vaudeville act with a wheelchair-bound comic named Joe Palmer. While accounts vary on the details - particularly, on what made the act fall apart - they all agree that Al left the other two. It’s what happened next that changed Al Jolson’s life.
Jolson suffered from stage-fright throughout his career; even at his considerable peak, he kept a puke bucket at the side of the stage to relieve the anxiety. His early career in vaudeville was no different - at least until 1904, when someone (a source names James Francis Dooley) suggested that Jolson perform in blackface. Painting on a mask melted away Jolson’s inhibitions, freeing him to improvise, tell dirty jokes, dance, do extended comic bits, etc. (though, again, the puke bucket never left his side). Now free to feed his craving for adulation (/mother), he was famous for doing anything to get and hold an audience’s complete and, notably, undivided attention. He went solo shortly after patting on blackface and bounced toward fame from one job to the next.
From here, the (real) Al Jolson Story becomes a succession of Broadway hits - most of them variety shows framed by barebones plots. He used them all as vehicles for his own success, most often by (to borrow Musicals 101’s favorite phrase) interpolating songs he wanted to sing into the production, scripts be damned. His first big play was 1911’s La Belle Paree, a loose story about Parisian high society, that had Jolson reviving old Stephen Foster songs in blackface every time he made an appearance. Another play in the same vein followed, Vera Violetta, but it wasn’t until his third play, Whirl of Society that he broke out in every sense of the word.
He introduced his character/alter-ego, Gus, “[an] African American underdog who outsmarted his enemies while exchanging wisecracks with the audience,” who he would play over and over again. Whirl of Society also saw Jolson’s first stab at “interpolating” - in this case, “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” and “Row, Row, Row” (well, I could find Eddie Cantor's version). By the time 1913’s The Honeymoon Express came around, he had the chutzpah to greet the opening night audience with, “Do you want to hear the rest of the story, or do you want me?” They lost their damn minds cheering and Jolson flipped the play into a one-man show. As Part 2 of Musicals 101’s bio puts it:
“No Broadway performer before or since ever attempted such a reckless stunt – Jolson made it a trademark. In his future Shubert shows, he would often dismiss the cast and give particularly appreciative audiences an hour or more of pure Jolson.”
Ego aside, Jolson changed what audiences expected during live performances. From the Ferris University essay:
“He demanded that a long runway be constructed, allowing him to move into the midst of the audience. He did not hesitate to change the course of a performance to satisfy the crowd's demands, sometimes singing on into the night, long after the show was supposed to be finished. Above all, he used every resource his body could muster to deepen the impression he made, orchestrating his face, his eyes, his limbs, his voice to amplify the intended effect. The vibrato of his voice, for instance, is so often accompanied by a tremulous motion of his body.”
The hits continued - first came Robinson Crusoe Jr., a 1916 play that saw Jolson play three parts (and that introduced “Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow” and “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night”), then came Sinbad in 1917-18, (which introduced both “Swanee” and his signature, cringe-tastic song, “My Mammy”) - while Jolson’s dark side wrecked havoc on his personal life. His first wife, Henrietta Keller, was the first of many to not only endure his relentless touring, but also his open cheating with chorus girls and reports of him “having call girls brought backstage to relieve his stress during intermissions.” He was no better professionally, e.g., pinching royalties from new (and likely struggling) songwriters by altering a few lines from the original, or berating and/or firing any performer who got too much of the spotlight while playing with him (see the “Loved and Hated” section in Part 2 of Musicals 101). Perhaps worst of all, he’d call all three of his wives - first, Keller, then Ethel Delmar, then Ruby Keeler (who, to her credit, refused to take his shit and didn’t have to) - imploring them to visit him on the road, only to send them home with nothing more than a peck on the cheek. This was called “the yo-yo treatment,” at least by Musicals 101, and we’re not yet to Jolson’s crowning moment.
His true breakthrough moment came with 1921’s Bombo, a straight-up vehicle for Jolson and his alter-ego, Gus. The plot barely made sense - i.e., Gus traveling with Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to the New World - and, fittingly, the numbers it introduced could not have possible made sense - e.g., “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” “April Showers,” and “California, Here I Come.” The play also occasioned one of Jolson’s most famous panics. Despite…literally, a decade’s worth of success, he had to be shoved out for the first act (by his brother/”manager” Harry, in fact), and again for the second. Whether the pressure of performing in a theater renamed in his honor before the show - thus the Winter Palace became Al Jolson’s 59th Street Theater - the audience rewarded his hesitance with ovations before and after every act, until they reached 37 total by curtain call…
…and it’s here where I acknowledge that, yes, just about everything discussed so far predates the 1920s. If anything, the 1920s saw the decline of Jolson’s career. Some of that time he spent wooing his second wife and an extended honeymoon, some of it suffering the first flop of his career with a play called, Big Boy (1925). His records kept flying off the shelves for as long as the Roaring 20s lasted and the next step in his career was just around the corner.
There was a famous moment earlier in Jolson’s career, an occasion when he had to follow famous opera/recording star, Enrico Caruso, and right after the Italian brought the house crashing down. The story goes that Jolson strode out onto the stage and started his act with this: “Folks, you ain’t heard nothing yet.” Jolson brought back the line to introduce the first audibly spoken lines in The Jazz Singer. The movie told a familiar story - a young man yearns to become a popular singer, over the objections of his rabbi/cantor father - only Jolson wasn’t so young (41 at the time) and the movie wasn’t so good. He brought the old magic to the singing portions, however, and The Jazz Singer became a smash and, to no one’s reasonable surprise, the first talkie killed off silent movies in short order.
He landed an even bigger smash with 1928’s, The Singing Fool, "the [remarkably fitting] story of an ambitious entertainer who insisted on going on with the show even as his small son lay dying” (it also introduced the song “Sonny Boy”). As he did in his Broadway days, Jolson tried to keep the money/fame churning with a series of movies that ripped off his own material - Say It with Songs (1929), Mammy (1930), and, somewhat mysteriously, Big Boy (1930) - but audience’s had cooled on both vaudeville and (finally) watching Jolson do the same thing over and over. By 1936’s The Singing Kid, he was parodying his own act, down to the histrionics and “taste for ‘mammy’ songs. The movie (and the next one) died at the box office and Jolson’s career died everywhere else.
The story would have ended there had someone not got an idea after watching the George M. Cohan biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandee, in 1942. Inspired by the reception (and box office returns), a Hollywood columnist named Sidney Skolsky pitched The Al Jolson Story to Columbia, who filmed and released the movie in 1947. A man named Larry Parks played the (now rather old) Jolson, but lip-synched over vocals that Jolson supplied. The movie gave Jolson one last hurrah, one that would carry him to his death in 1950 - a surprisingly charming story told best in The Guardian’s1950 obituary (which was floating around online incredibly).
Though Jolson never served, he performed for the troops in every conflict from World War I through the Korean War. He’d just returned from a tour that had taken a lot out of him on its own, when he spent an evening playing cards with some friends before a scheduled appearance on a Bing Crosby TV show. After complaining of feeling off, he laid down and slowly lost strength over the course of the evening. When his final moment arrived, the Guardian’s obit reports his final words as, “Hell, Truman had only one hour with MacArthur. I had two.”
The above left out a lot of detail, not to mention more nuance than I would have liked. To answer one likely question, there is no indication Jolson was an open racist, or even racist at all; in fact, reports from Cab Calloway (see Wikipedia), Eubie Blake and Noble Sissie suggest the opposite (Ferris University). There is no question, however, that he was a tremendous asshole and to those closest to him most of all.
The real mystery to me, though, was the material of his career. On some level, Jolson was a nostalgist. One source for his material, Stephen Foster, had his string of “hits” (as counted in sheet music sales) in the middle of the 19th century; moreover, most of his material called back to that same sound and sensibility - i.e., the old homesickness genre and weird (distasteful) nostalgia for Dixie; the man sang a lot of songs about the Old South for a Lithuanian-American Jew. That Ferris University essay summed up Al Jolson’s career nicely with this:
“Most of all, his long-standing use of blackface made Jolson seem like the last representative of the 19th century, not a harbinger of the brave new world of multimedia entertainment.”
About the Sampler
I named several of the songs I chose up above - most of them associated with his Broadway plays or, in the case of “Sonny Boy,” one of Jolson’s movies - but the rest I chose for a variety of reasons. For instance, I selected “Rock a Bye Your Baby with a Dixie” and “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?” to rep his fascination with the Old South, but you get the same from “Swanee” and “My Mammy.” I chose his duet with (I believe) Bing Crosby on “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” as a sort of homage to the bridging of one musical generation (ragtime) to the next (swing). Most of the rest feature Jolson singing songs I already know from other artists - e.g., “After You’ve Gone” and “Carolina in the Morning” - songs I like a little - e.g., “When the Red, Red Robin” and “The Spaniard Who Blighted My Life” - and songs I found, for lack of a better word, a little fucked up - e.g., “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl,” which basically talks about wanting to marry his mom. (I appreciate his loss and all, but...)
Finally, I included a nod to Jolson’s Jewish roots by including “Hatikvah.” His relationship with his father might have been one of the few normal ones in Jolson’s life. There’s this great story about a time when Jolson saved some seats for his father when (I think) Bombo came to DC. His father didn’t show, but he later had him over for dinner. Based on the little I read, I’d say Moses Yoelson was proud of his son’s career, but not quite approving.
“If blackface has its shameful poster boy, it is Al Jolson. Many other 20th-century performers from Shirley Temple to Bing Crosby donned the makeup for various roles, but Jolson adopted it as a core part of his public persona.”
After a little reading and a lot of thought, calling him America’s first rock star best translates Al Jolson for a modern audience: several times larger than life, consumed by ego, and burning bridges all the way. They made a movie called The Jolson Story in 1947, but his personal history would have posed one hell of a challenge to making Jolson sympathetic.
Jolson was born Asa Yoelson circa 1886 in Seredzius, Kovno Governate, Russian Empire, aka, what is now Lithuania. Because Russia wasn’t the gentlest place for Jews (pogroms, etc.), his father Moses Yoelson, a rabbi and a cantor, made arrangements to relocate to the U.S., first on his own to get settled then to send for his family. (The best source for this period was a site called Musicals 101; just to note it, you’ll learn more from their four-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) than you will reading this.) His wife Naomi brought over Asa and his three siblings - two sisters, Rose and Etta (both bit players in his story) and his older brother Hirsch (highly relevant) - and the family planted roots in Washington D.C…for as long as Naomi kept them planted. Jolson’s mother died when he was 10, an event that, by every account I read, shattered Jolson; as Musical 101 puts it, “Jolson, for all his tough, earthy exterior, would remain an emotional child for the rest of his life.”
Despite Moses Yoelson’s dreams that both boys would follow him into the family business, they were busking on DC street corners as early as 1897; they even Americanized their names to Harry and Al. When Harry moved to New York to get into show business, Al ran away to join him (they both ran away a lot, as it happened); the ragtime bug had bit them both. Wikipedia’s history of Jolson mentions some time spent in the circus, but the Jolson brothers eventually teamed up to form a vaudeville act with a wheelchair-bound comic named Joe Palmer. While accounts vary on the details - particularly, on what made the act fall apart - they all agree that Al left the other two. It’s what happened next that changed Al Jolson’s life.
Jolson suffered from stage-fright throughout his career; even at his considerable peak, he kept a puke bucket at the side of the stage to relieve the anxiety. His early career in vaudeville was no different - at least until 1904, when someone (a source names James Francis Dooley) suggested that Jolson perform in blackface. Painting on a mask melted away Jolson’s inhibitions, freeing him to improvise, tell dirty jokes, dance, do extended comic bits, etc. (though, again, the puke bucket never left his side). Now free to feed his craving for adulation (/mother), he was famous for doing anything to get and hold an audience’s complete and, notably, undivided attention. He went solo shortly after patting on blackface and bounced toward fame from one job to the next.
From here, the (real) Al Jolson Story becomes a succession of Broadway hits - most of them variety shows framed by barebones plots. He used them all as vehicles for his own success, most often by (to borrow Musicals 101’s favorite phrase) interpolating songs he wanted to sing into the production, scripts be damned. His first big play was 1911’s La Belle Paree, a loose story about Parisian high society, that had Jolson reviving old Stephen Foster songs in blackface every time he made an appearance. Another play in the same vein followed, Vera Violetta, but it wasn’t until his third play, Whirl of Society that he broke out in every sense of the word.
He introduced his character/alter-ego, Gus, “[an] African American underdog who outsmarted his enemies while exchanging wisecracks with the audience,” who he would play over and over again. Whirl of Society also saw Jolson’s first stab at “interpolating” - in this case, “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” and “Row, Row, Row” (well, I could find Eddie Cantor's version). By the time 1913’s The Honeymoon Express came around, he had the chutzpah to greet the opening night audience with, “Do you want to hear the rest of the story, or do you want me?” They lost their damn minds cheering and Jolson flipped the play into a one-man show. As Part 2 of Musicals 101’s bio puts it:
“No Broadway performer before or since ever attempted such a reckless stunt – Jolson made it a trademark. In his future Shubert shows, he would often dismiss the cast and give particularly appreciative audiences an hour or more of pure Jolson.”
Ego aside, Jolson changed what audiences expected during live performances. From the Ferris University essay:
“He demanded that a long runway be constructed, allowing him to move into the midst of the audience. He did not hesitate to change the course of a performance to satisfy the crowd's demands, sometimes singing on into the night, long after the show was supposed to be finished. Above all, he used every resource his body could muster to deepen the impression he made, orchestrating his face, his eyes, his limbs, his voice to amplify the intended effect. The vibrato of his voice, for instance, is so often accompanied by a tremulous motion of his body.”
The hits continued - first came Robinson Crusoe Jr., a 1916 play that saw Jolson play three parts (and that introduced “Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow” and “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night”), then came Sinbad in 1917-18, (which introduced both “Swanee” and his signature, cringe-tastic song, “My Mammy”) - while Jolson’s dark side wrecked havoc on his personal life. His first wife, Henrietta Keller, was the first of many to not only endure his relentless touring, but also his open cheating with chorus girls and reports of him “having call girls brought backstage to relieve his stress during intermissions.” He was no better professionally, e.g., pinching royalties from new (and likely struggling) songwriters by altering a few lines from the original, or berating and/or firing any performer who got too much of the spotlight while playing with him (see the “Loved and Hated” section in Part 2 of Musicals 101). Perhaps worst of all, he’d call all three of his wives - first, Keller, then Ethel Delmar, then Ruby Keeler (who, to her credit, refused to take his shit and didn’t have to) - imploring them to visit him on the road, only to send them home with nothing more than a peck on the cheek. This was called “the yo-yo treatment,” at least by Musicals 101, and we’re not yet to Jolson’s crowning moment.
His true breakthrough moment came with 1921’s Bombo, a straight-up vehicle for Jolson and his alter-ego, Gus. The plot barely made sense - i.e., Gus traveling with Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to the New World - and, fittingly, the numbers it introduced could not have possible made sense - e.g., “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” “April Showers,” and “California, Here I Come.” The play also occasioned one of Jolson’s most famous panics. Despite…literally, a decade’s worth of success, he had to be shoved out for the first act (by his brother/”manager” Harry, in fact), and again for the second. Whether the pressure of performing in a theater renamed in his honor before the show - thus the Winter Palace became Al Jolson’s 59th Street Theater - the audience rewarded his hesitance with ovations before and after every act, until they reached 37 total by curtain call…
…and it’s here where I acknowledge that, yes, just about everything discussed so far predates the 1920s. If anything, the 1920s saw the decline of Jolson’s career. Some of that time he spent wooing his second wife and an extended honeymoon, some of it suffering the first flop of his career with a play called, Big Boy (1925). His records kept flying off the shelves for as long as the Roaring 20s lasted and the next step in his career was just around the corner.
There was a famous moment earlier in Jolson’s career, an occasion when he had to follow famous opera/recording star, Enrico Caruso, and right after the Italian brought the house crashing down. The story goes that Jolson strode out onto the stage and started his act with this: “Folks, you ain’t heard nothing yet.” Jolson brought back the line to introduce the first audibly spoken lines in The Jazz Singer. The movie told a familiar story - a young man yearns to become a popular singer, over the objections of his rabbi/cantor father - only Jolson wasn’t so young (41 at the time) and the movie wasn’t so good. He brought the old magic to the singing portions, however, and The Jazz Singer became a smash and, to no one’s reasonable surprise, the first talkie killed off silent movies in short order.
He landed an even bigger smash with 1928’s, The Singing Fool, "the [remarkably fitting] story of an ambitious entertainer who insisted on going on with the show even as his small son lay dying” (it also introduced the song “Sonny Boy”). As he did in his Broadway days, Jolson tried to keep the money/fame churning with a series of movies that ripped off his own material - Say It with Songs (1929), Mammy (1930), and, somewhat mysteriously, Big Boy (1930) - but audience’s had cooled on both vaudeville and (finally) watching Jolson do the same thing over and over. By 1936’s The Singing Kid, he was parodying his own act, down to the histrionics and “taste for ‘mammy’ songs. The movie (and the next one) died at the box office and Jolson’s career died everywhere else.
The story would have ended there had someone not got an idea after watching the George M. Cohan biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandee, in 1942. Inspired by the reception (and box office returns), a Hollywood columnist named Sidney Skolsky pitched The Al Jolson Story to Columbia, who filmed and released the movie in 1947. A man named Larry Parks played the (now rather old) Jolson, but lip-synched over vocals that Jolson supplied. The movie gave Jolson one last hurrah, one that would carry him to his death in 1950 - a surprisingly charming story told best in The Guardian’s1950 obituary (which was floating around online incredibly).
Though Jolson never served, he performed for the troops in every conflict from World War I through the Korean War. He’d just returned from a tour that had taken a lot out of him on its own, when he spent an evening playing cards with some friends before a scheduled appearance on a Bing Crosby TV show. After complaining of feeling off, he laid down and slowly lost strength over the course of the evening. When his final moment arrived, the Guardian’s obit reports his final words as, “Hell, Truman had only one hour with MacArthur. I had two.”
The above left out a lot of detail, not to mention more nuance than I would have liked. To answer one likely question, there is no indication Jolson was an open racist, or even racist at all; in fact, reports from Cab Calloway (see Wikipedia), Eubie Blake and Noble Sissie suggest the opposite (Ferris University). There is no question, however, that he was a tremendous asshole and to those closest to him most of all.
The real mystery to me, though, was the material of his career. On some level, Jolson was a nostalgist. One source for his material, Stephen Foster, had his string of “hits” (as counted in sheet music sales) in the middle of the 19th century; moreover, most of his material called back to that same sound and sensibility - i.e., the old homesickness genre and weird (distasteful) nostalgia for Dixie; the man sang a lot of songs about the Old South for a Lithuanian-American Jew. That Ferris University essay summed up Al Jolson’s career nicely with this:
“Most of all, his long-standing use of blackface made Jolson seem like the last representative of the 19th century, not a harbinger of the brave new world of multimedia entertainment.”
About the Sampler
I named several of the songs I chose up above - most of them associated with his Broadway plays or, in the case of “Sonny Boy,” one of Jolson’s movies - but the rest I chose for a variety of reasons. For instance, I selected “Rock a Bye Your Baby with a Dixie” and “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?” to rep his fascination with the Old South, but you get the same from “Swanee” and “My Mammy.” I chose his duet with (I believe) Bing Crosby on “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” as a sort of homage to the bridging of one musical generation (ragtime) to the next (swing). Most of the rest feature Jolson singing songs I already know from other artists - e.g., “After You’ve Gone” and “Carolina in the Morning” - songs I like a little - e.g., “When the Red, Red Robin” and “The Spaniard Who Blighted My Life” - and songs I found, for lack of a better word, a little fucked up - e.g., “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl,” which basically talks about wanting to marry his mom. (I appreciate his loss and all, but...)
Finally, I included a nod to Jolson’s Jewish roots by including “Hatikvah.” His relationship with his father might have been one of the few normal ones in Jolson’s life. There’s this great story about a time when Jolson saved some seats for his father when (I think) Bombo came to DC. His father didn’t show, but he later had him over for dinner. Based on the little I read, I’d say Moses Yoelson was proud of his son’s career, but not quite approving.
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