Al Jolson

Al Jolson (1886-1950) was not merely the man who appeared in The Jazz Singer. He was one of the central figures in the creation of modern American popular entertainment. He was born Asa Yoelson in Lithuania, usually given as May 26, 1886, though the exact date is uncertain. His father, Moses Yoelson, was a rabbi and cantor. He had come to the US in 1891 and was already working as a cantor in Washington, DC when Jolson and the rest of his family arrived in the United States on April 9, 1894.

Jolson’s early life furnished the rough material of his later career: immigrant poverty, a religious household, rebellion against paternal authority, street singing, and a hunger for applause. His mother’s early death seems to have affected him deeply, and the theme of maternal longing, which later became almost a Jolson trademark, had a personal root as well as a commercial one. The boy who sang for coins became the man who could make sentimental songs seem like public confessions.

Jolson’s education was vaudeville. That world was unforgiving. An act either held the audience or died visibly in front of it. Jolson learned timing, attack, improvisation, and the brutal economy of popular performance. He worked with his brother Harry and with Joe Palmer in a comedy act, then gradually emerged as a solo performer. By the time the Shuberts brought him to New York, he had developed many of the devices that would define him: the forward-leaning stance, the explosive entrance, the mock-intimate address to the audience, the sudden shifts from comedy to pathos, and the ability to make even routine material sound urgent.

His Broadway breakthrough came with La Belle Paree at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1911. Jolson quickly established himself as the biggest star on Broadway. Jolson was among the first American performers whose personality was bigger than the show containing him. Audiences went to see Jolson, not the book, the plot, or even necessarily the score. Like later stars from Ethel Merman to Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley, he turned performance into personal possession. At the height of his fame and powers, he was likely the biggest star of the 20th century.

The Winter Garden became, in effect, Jolson’s kingdom. He appeared in a succession of Shubert shows, including Vera Violetta, The Honeymoon Express, Robinson Crusoe, Jr, Sinbad, Bombo, and Big Boy. The titles are now mostly theatrical archaeology, but Jolson’s numbers survived because he made songs into events. “Swanee,” “April Showers,” “Toot, Toot, Tootsie!,” “California, Here I Come,” “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” “Sonny Boy,” and “My Mammy” became associated with him because he stamped them with a fiercely personal style.

Blackface must be mentioned, but it should not swallow his entire career. Jolson worked within the theatrical conventions of his time, especially vaudeville and minstrel shows, where blackface was common among white performers and even, in complicated ways, used by some Black performers as well. By today’s standards, the convention is seen as racially offensive and bound to degrading stereotypes. But to understand Jolson historically, one has to see that he did not invent the form, nor was his appeal reducible to it. His blackface act was part of a broader stage idiom of ethnic impersonation, immigrant self-fashioning, racial caricature, and popular song. It gave him a mask through which he projected warmth, grief, comedy, and rhythmic excitement.

Of course, as often happens, some have overreacted to the use of blackface failing to make the distinction between it and makeup. Thus, the Metropolitan Opera refuses to let a white singer portraying Verdi’s Otello darken his face to appear black, as the libretto requires. That the Met and its ilk can’t see the difference tells one how enmeshed in wokism a major cultural institution has become. ChatGPT is even worse. It wouldn’t let me manipulate a photo of the theater that premiered The Jazz Singer because it showed Jolson in blackface. Here’s the reason it gave me: We’re so sorry, but the image we created may violate our guardrails around harassment, discrimination, bullying, or similar prohibited content. So much for one of the most important events in human culture.

The Jazz Singer opened in 1927. Historically, its importance is immense. The film was not a fully talking picture in the later sense, but its synchronized singing and spoken passages made it the symbolic beginning of the sound era. Jolson’s famous “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” became one of the great accidental prophecies of film history. The film’s impact was a turning point that helped end the silent era and forced Hollywood into sound. Interestingly, it was even Jolson’s first sound film. The year before, he had made a 10-minute film – A Plantation Act that was intended to introduce a full-length silent movie. It’s below.

Yet for Jolson himself, The Jazz Singer was less a beginning than a transfer of his stage identity to a new medium. The plot, about a cantor’s son torn between religious inheritance and show business, was almost too perfectly suited to him. His film career after The Jazz Singer was substantial but uneven. The Singing Fool in 1928 was a huge success and gave him “Sonny Boy,” one of his most famous recordings. He followed it with Say It with Songs in 1929, Mammy and Big Boy in 1930, and later Hallelujah, I’m a Bum and Wonder Bar. These films preserved elements of his stage personality, but they also revealed a problem. Jolson was born for a live audience. Film fixed him in place. What had seemed electric in a theater could look broad or old-fashioned on screen, especially as acting styles changed and microphones encouraged quieter vocalism. He remained a major name, but the movies were not his natural milieu in the way the Winter Garden had been.

By the 1940s he was a relatively minor figure compared to what he had been 20 years earlier. Then came one of the most striking comebacks in American entertainment. The Jolson Story appeared in 1946, with Larry Parks playing Jolson and Jolson himself dubbing the songs, though he was uncredited. The film was a major success, and its sequel, Jolson Sings Again, followed in 1949. These films revived Jolson for a generation that had not seen him dominate Broadway. They also converted him into legend while he was still alive. The old songs returned to circulation; his recordings sold again; radio welcomed him back; and Jolson, never shy about applause, took the revival as vindication.

His devotion to entertaining servicemen was not a footnote. It was one of the most admirable parts of his career. He had supported troops in earlier wars, sold Liberty Bonds during World War I, and then threw himself into entertaining American forces during World War II. He entertained troops at home and abroad during World War II and later during the Korean War. In 1950, despite age and ill health, he went to Korea and performed an exhausting schedule, often described as 42 shows in 16 days. Soon after returning to the United States, he died of a heart attack in San Francisco on October 23, 1950.

During his tour of the Pacific Theater during World War II, he contracted malaria and then developed pneumonia that advanced to empyema. He had part or all of his left lung removed. The sources about this illness are uncertain as to whether part or all of his lung was removed. Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall gave Jolson the Medal for Merit for his service to the troops. The Medal for Merit was then the highest civilian decoration the United States could award. It had been created during World War II for civilians who performed exceptionally meritorious service in the war effort. It was awarded posthumously, a few months after Jolson’s death in October 1950. The medal was presented to Jolson’s son, with Jolson’s widow present. The citation reportedly said that Jolson’s contribution to the U.N. action in Korea was made “at the expense of his life.”

Jolson’s career is difficult to compress because he belonged to several eras at once. He was a vaudeville performer who became a Broadway monarch; a Broadway monarch who became the emblem of talking pictures; an old-fashioned belter who survived into radio; a sentimentalist who could be genuinely funny; a self-promoter who gave unstintingly to soldiers; a performer tied to blackface who also helped bring Black-influenced music into the American mainstream.

His limitations are obvious. His taste could be gaudy. His pathos could turn syrupy. His ego was mountainous. His racial materials now sit uneasily, or worse, with modern audiences. But his virtues were just as large: energy, presence, timing, courage, generosity, and an almost frightening instinct for audience response. Jolson was not a museum piece in his own time. He was an event. To understand why he mattered, one must imagine not merely the surviving recordings or film clips, but a packed theater, the lights hot, the audience restless, and Jolson stepping forward with the absolute confidence that he could stop the show whenever he wished. More often than not, he could.

A Plantation Act