Crash Course Timeline Music History Index: The 1920s, the 1930s & Early Popular Genres

The roots of this haphazard history of American popular music originally started about a year earlier and at least one music blog before this one. The former timeline started with the 1820s - when the United States as we (sort of) know it was just over 30 years old - and continued up to the 1920s. It introduced a multiplicity of themes and pathways, among them: the homesickness genre, a product of the Industrial Age and families scattered as wide as they’ve been in human history; the interaction between popular music and waves of immigration; the bloodthirsty/God-is-on-our-side anthems of America’s wars, both civil and others; the massive, popular, semi-utopian “Jubilee” concerts that followed; the noteworthy spasm of Christmas carols that bloomed alongside the commercialization of that holiday; the odd devotional number; marching bands and the arrival of modern brass instruments; the maudlin borderline hackery of the late Victorian era; the establishment and growth of Tin Pan Alley and its remarkable marketing machinery; and, perhaps more important than any of them in terms of what came later, minstrelsy. No less significant: literally all of that moved about the country by way of sheet music, the first conduit for the mass marketing of popular music.

All of that both informed and laid the foundation for much of what followed, but it also existed and operated in a vastly different and slower world. I think citizens of the 21st century can conceptualize, even appreciate those times, but actually wrapping one’s head around all that silence requires more imagination that most of us have. So, I took down those posts (twice, in fact) and restarted this follow-up project from a different foundation: the dawn of recorded sound, aka, the beginnings of a time when people could hear music without having friends who knew how to play it and, by the same devices, listen to a song until it either inspired them or made them puke.

Recordings existed well before the 1920s - singers ranging from John McCormack and Eddie Murray to the famous tenor Enrico Caruso (who recorded for one label's “high-class series”) - but I decided to start with the 1920s for several reasons. The ability to record sound came several decades before (by memory, the mid-1870s), but even 40 years later the sound remained limited - e.g., the recordings literally could not pick up pitches on the high end and some instruments all together - and, therefore, terrible. It took a decade or five for all the tinniness/recording-in-a-bucket-inside-a-box to the leech out, but recording and records (it’s all still 78 rpm at this point) reached the lofty heights of reasonable listening experience as early as the mid-1920s and continued to improve into the 1930s. Once film and radio arrived, they opened avenues for musical artists to spread their presence and influence across multiple mediums - i.e., the essence of modern stardom. That brings the story to the beginning of the modern era, at least in my mind. That said, keep in mind that the entire concept and culture of radio belongs to the 1930s - i.e., a time when the collapse of the consumer market made something one owns and turns on for entertainment the thriftier choice over something one buys and collects. As you’ll see if you read the posts below, a lot of them end with the Great Depression.

That gets ahead of the story, so, pulling back ten years, people call the 1920s the Jazz Age, but that does a real disservice to proliferation of genres that started and blossomed in jazz’s shadow. While none of them actually started in the 1920s, the way communications shrunk the world made once regional sounds available to a national audience - and one with resources to burn. That included the beginnings of country music - which, incidentally, came from the folk traditions of the 19th century - and at least three kinds of blues - e.g., 1) the female royalty of the early 20s, 2) the lone, often haunted blues men of the late 20s, and 3), at the tail-end, boogie-woogie. To back up even further, all of those borrowed something from ragtime - aka, the first “scary” (read: black) music to spook establishment white audiences - and Tin Pan Alley blended all that with popular sounds and themes from earlier eras, and that’s what the 1920s sounded like. Innovation meets mass-marketing, basically; strip away technologies that forever expand availability and accessibility and it’s not so different today.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 7: Al Jolson & His Various Demons

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.