Al Jolson

Al Jolson

Al Jolson (May 26, 1886–October 23, 1950) was a highly acclaimed American singer, comedian and actor of Jewish heritage whose career lasted from 1911 until his death in 1950. He was one of the most popular entertainers of the 20th century whose influence extended to other popular performers, including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Jr., Eddie Fisher, Jerry Lewis, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Michael Jackson, David Lee Roth and Rod Stewart.

Al Jolson was the first popular singer to make a spectacular "event" out of singing a song. Prior to Jolson, popular singers such as John McCormack and Henry Burr would stand still with only very minimal gesturing as they sang. Jolson, in comparison, had tremendous energy displayed in his performances by way of dynamic gestures and other physical movement. Jolson was the first entertainer to use a runway extending out from the center of the stage, so he could be closer to the audience. It was very common for Jolson to sit on the end of the runway and have personal one-on-one conversations with audience members, which had also never been done prior to Jolson.

Jolson was known to stop major Broadway productions in which he was involved, turn to the audience and ask them if they would rather hear him sing instead of watching the rest of the play. The answer from the audience was always a resounding "yes," and Jolson would spend at least the next hour singing an impromptu concert to an ecstatic audience. George Burns, the popular American comedian and friend of Al Jolson probably described Jolson best when he said, "...Jolson was all Show Business!"

Early life and career

Al Jolson was born Asa Yoelson in Seredzius, Lithuania. The exact date of his birth is unknown but it was estimated to have been May 26, 1886. However, when Jolson sailed aboard the S.S. President Adams from New York (April 30) to Los Angeles (May 18) 1925, he gave his date of birth as May 26, 1885 and his place of birth is regularly given on records as Washington D.C rather than in Lithuania.

In his early childhood, his Jewish parents, Moshe Reuben Yoelson and Naomi Ettas Cantor, emigrated to the United States. The family name originally had been Hesselson. It was thought until recently that Al's father became the rabbi of the Talmud Torah Synagogue (now, Ohev Sholom Talmud Torah), in Washington, D.C., also secularly known as a cantor, whereas in reality Al was in later years to admit that his father was a slaughterer or "shochet" of kosher animals, as well as performing circumcisions or "bris" in the role of a "mohel".

Young Asa became a popular singer in New York City, beginning as early as 1898, when he and his brother entertained troops during the Spanish American War. Adopting the stage name Al Jolson, he gradually developed the key elements of his performance: a somewhat operatic-like style of singing, exuberant physical mannerisms and gestures, bird-like whistling with the use of his fingers and hands, and directly addressing his audience.

By 1911, he had parlayed a supporting appearance in the Broadway musical, La Belle Paree, into a starring role. He began recording and was soon internationally famous for his extraordinary stage presence and personal rapport with audiences. His Broadway career spanned close to 30 years (1911–1940). Audiences shouted, pleaded, and often would not allow the show to proceed; such was the power of Jolson's presence. At one performance in Boston, the usually staid and conservative audience stopped the show for 45 minutes. He was said to have had an "electric" personality, along with the ability to make each member of the audience believe that he was singing only for them.

Among the many songs he popularized were "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)," "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody," "Swanee" (songwriter George Gershwin's first success), "April Showers," "Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye," "California, Here I Come," "When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along," "Sonny Boy," and "Avalon."

Jolson was the first musical artist to sell more than 10 million records. While no official Billboard magazine chart existed during his career, its staff archivist Joel Whitburn used a variety of sources, such as Talking Machine World's list of top-selling recordings and Billboard's own sheet music and vaudeville charts, to estimate the hits of 1890-1954. By his reckoning, Jolson had the equivalent of twenty-three No. 1 hits, the fourth-highest total ever, trailing only Bing Crosby, Paul Whiteman, and Guy Lombardo. Whitburn calculates that Jolson would have topped one chart or another for 114 weeks.

Blackface performer

Performing in blackface was a theatrical convention used by many entertainers at the beginning of the 20th century, having origins in the tradition of the minstrel show. Al Jolson was the most famous entertainer who appeared in blackface and thus is sometimes used as an example of whites propagating racial stereotypes in film. But he actually created a novel, sensational, and thereby unrealistic black leading male role for stage and screen, which was certainly not a black stereotype as black stars didn't exist at that time. His blackface characters were always the star, whether in his movies or in front of live and enthusiastic white audiences. In his musical movie roles, moreover, whether as a singing hobo (Hallelujah, I'm a Bum) or as a jailed convict in (Say it with Songs) he acted without blackface. He performed his most popular and most passionate songs in blackface: i.e.Swanee, Mammy, Rock-a-bye your Baby, many of which were composed by some of the best songwriters at that time, such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.

Jolson had first heard African-American music in New Orleans in 1905, had great admiration and respect for it, and he performed it for the rest of his life, although mostly without blackface. He chose to star in the world's first talking picture, The Jazz Singer(1927) and in it perform many of his best songs in blackface. Overall, for a new American entertainment industry, he single-handedly helped bridge the cultural gap between black and white America by introducing African-American musical innovations like jazz, ragtime, and the blues to white audiences. He is credited with helping to open the door for many early African-American performers like Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, and others, and thus his blackface screen stardom may have been one of the best things to have happened to black music in the early 20th century.

Movies

In the first part of the 20th century, Al Jolson was without question the most popular performer to appear in Broadway productions and in vaudeville. His popularity was so overwhelming that show-business historians regard him as a legendary institution. Yet for all his success in live venues, Al Jolson is possibly best remembered today for his numerous recordings and for starring in the landmark motion picture The Jazz Singer, the first nationally distributed feature film that included dialogue sequences as well as music and sound effects.

The Jazz Singer was produced by Warner Brothers, using its revolutionary Vitaphone sound process. Vitaphone was originally intended for musical renditions, and The Jazz Singer follows this principle, with only the musical sequences using live sound recording. Much of the film is a silent drama, telling the sentimental story of a Jewish boy who loves to sing popular songs. He becomes a cabaret and stage star, much to the disgust of his estranged father (Warner Oland), a cantor in the synagogue.

The silent narrative was interesting enough for moviegoers of the day, but what really electrified them was when the action was interrupted periodically for a Vitaphone song sequence with synchronized sound. Jolson's dynamic voice, entertaining physical mannerisms, and charisma held the audience spellbound. The irrepressible Jolson insisted on improvising incidental dialogue, and for the first time moviegoers could share in the intimacy and immediacy of a spoken conversation. Jolson ad-libs freely while singing "Blue Skies" to his mother, explaining how he's going to move her into a better neighborhood when he becomes successful. (Nobody on the set was ready for Jolson's engaging ramblings, and the actress playing the mother, Eugenie Besserer, does her best to hide her surprise and go along with the scene.) It was the talking, not the music as the Warners had predicted, that delighted the customers and made them clamor for more "talkies."

Jolson had actually filmed a brief musical performance before The Jazz Singer. A Plantation Act was one of Warners' musical short subjects featuring Broadway and vaudeville headliners. Jolson, in blackface and ragged costume, prances on screen in a bucolic setting and sings three songs, with incidental patter between songs. So close is this to an actual stage act that Jolson returns for two curtain calls after his performance. This Jolson short was the key attraction in Warners' second theatrical demonstration of Vitaphone. Historians such as Donald Crafton ("The Talkies," University of California Press) have disputed the official Warner Bros. account of the "talkie revolution," suggesting that the Vitaphone shorts, in production since 1926 and often including significant dialogue passages, were actually more influential than "The Jazz Singer" in establishing the public taste for talking films.

A Plantation Act was considered lost as far back as 1933 (Jolson had requested a print and was advised that the film no longer existed) but a mute print was discovered in the Warner vaults. The Vitaphone Project, a consortium of early-sound-film enthusiasts and collectors, located a damaged soundtrack disc and painstakingly restored the sound to the picture. Included with the Warner Home Video DVD of "The Jazz Singer," the short contains almost as much dialogue as the later feature.

Signing with Warners for a series, Al Jolson made his first "all-talking" picture, The Singing Fool (1928) — the story of a driven entertainer who insisted upon going on with the show even as his small son lay dying, and its signature tune, "Sonny Boy," became the first American record to sell one million copies. The film was even more popular than The Jazz Singer, and held the record for box-office attendance for 11 years, broken by Gone with the Wind.

Jolson continued to make features for Warners, very similar in style to The Singing Fool: Say It with Songs (1929), Mammy (1930), and Big Boy (1930). A restored version of Mammy, which includes Jolson in some Technicolor sequences, was first screened in 2002. (Jolson's first Technicolor appearance was in a cameo in the musical Show Girl in Hollywood (1930) from First National Pictures, a Warner Bros. subsidiary.) The sameness of the stories, Jolson's large salary, and changing public tastes in musicals contributed to the films' diminishing returns over the next few years. Warners allowed him to make one film elsewhere: Hallelujah, I'm a Bum was released by United Artists in 1933.

Returning to Warners, Jolson submitted to new production ideas, focusing less on the star and more on elaborately cinematic numbers staged by Busby Berkeley and Bobby Connolly. This new approach worked, sustaining Jolson's movie career until the Warner contract lapsed in 1935. Jolson co-starred with his actress-dancer wife, Ruby Keeler, only once, in Go Into Your Dance.

Jolson's last Warner vehicle was the highly entertaining "The Singing Kid," a gentle parody of Jolson's stage persona (he plays a character named Al Jackson) in which he pokes fun at his stage histrionics and taste for "mammy" songs -- the latter via a very witty number by E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen titled "I Love to Singa," and a comedy song with Jolson doggedly trying to sing "Mammy" while The Yacht Club Boys keep telling him such songs are outdated. "The Singing Kid" was not one of the studio's major attractions -- it went out under the subsidiary "First National" trademark, and Jolson didn't even rate "starring" billing -- but it remains one of Jolson's best.

Jolson did not return to films until 1939, when Twentieth Century-Fox hired him to re-create a scene from The Jazz Singer in the Alice Faye-Don Ameche film Hollywood Cavalcade. Guest appearances in two more Fox films followed that same year, but Jolson never starred in a full-length feature film again.

Personal life

Jolson was a political and economic conservative, supporting Calvin Coolidge for president of the United States in 1924 (with the ditty, "Keep Cool with Coolidge"), unlike most other Jewish performers, who supported the losing Democratic candidate, John William Davis.

Jolson was married four times:

- to Henrietta Keller from 1907 to 1920. She was a dancer in New York's Broadway revues.

- to Ethel Delmar from 1922 to 1926. She was also a dancer.

- to Ruby Keeler from 1928 to 1939, when they divorced. The couple had adopted a son, Al Jolson, Jr., during their marriage, but when he was fourteen, the boy changed his name to Peter Lowe after his mother's second husband, John Lowe.

- to Erle Chennault Galbraith from 1945 to his death on October 23, 1950. She was an x-ray technician from a wealthy, aristocratic family in the American South and this marriage is said to be Jolson's happiest one. The couple had two adopted children, Albert "Al" Jolson, Jr. and Alicia Jolson. Alicia died young as a result of her severe impairment. Albert Jolson Jr., who was raised in the US and Switzerland owns a recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee. Erle later married writer Norman Krasna.

A lifelong devotion to entertaining American servicemen (he first sang for servicemen of the Spanish-American War as a boy in Washington, D.C.) led Jolson to entertain American troops during World War II, and again (against the advice of his doctors) in Korea. Congress posthumously awarded him the Congressional Order of Merit.

Jolson remained very popular among the American and International culture and was dubbed the world's greatest entertainer. He contributed millions to Jewish and other charities in his will.[[1]].

The Jolson Story

After the success of the George M. Cohan film biography, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky believed that a similar film could made about Al Jolson -- and he knew just where to pitch the project. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, may have seemed to a lot of people in Hollywood like a crude, loud vulgarian, but he had one soft spot: he loved the music of Al Jolson.

Skolsky pitched the idea of an Al Jolson biopic and Cohn agreed to it. Directed by Alfred E. Green (best known today for the pre-Code masterpiece Baby Face) with musical numbers staged by the imaginative Joseph H. Lewis, The Jolson Story is one of the most entertaining of the musical biopics of that era -- an era that included Yankee Doodle Dandy, Till the Clouds Roll By, Words and Music, and Three Little Words.

With Jolson providing almost all the vocals, and veteran Columbia contractee Larry Parks playing Jolson, The Jolson Story (1946) became one of the biggest hits of the year. Parks received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and the film became one of the highest-grossing films of the year. Although Jolson was too old to play himself in the film, he persuaded the studio to let him appear in one musical sequence, shot entirely in long shot, with Jolson in blackface.

The Jolson Story and its sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949) led to a whole new generation who became enthralled with Jolson's voice and charisma. Jolson, who had been a popular guest star on radio since its earliest days, now had his own show, hosting the Kraft Music Hall from 1947-1949, with Oscar Levant as a sardonic piano-playing sidekick. Despite such singers as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Perry Como being in their primes, Jolson was voted the "Most Popular Male Vocalist" in 1948 by a poll in the show biz newspaper Variety. The next year, Jolson was named "Personality of the Year" by the Variety Clubs of America. When Jolson appeared on Bing Crosby's radio show, he attributed his receiving the award to his being the only singer not to make a record of Mule Train, which had been a widely covered hit of that year (four different versions, one of them by Crosby, had made the top ten on the charts). Jolson even joked that he had tried to sing the hit song: "I got the clippetys all right, but I can't clop like I used to."

Plans for television

When Jolson appeared on Steve Allen's KNX Los Angeles radio show in 1949 to promote Jolson Sings Again, he offered his curt opinion of the burgeoning television industry: "I call it smell-evision." Writer Hal Kanter recalled that Jolson's own idea of his TV debut would be a corporate-sponsored, extra-length spectacular that would feature him as the only performer, and would be telecast without interruption. In 1950, it was announced that Jolson agreed to appear on the CBS Television Network. However, he died before production could be initiated.

Also in 1950, Columbia was thinking about a third Jolson musical, and this time Jolson would play himself. The project, tentatively titled You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet, was to dramatize Jolson's recent tours of military bases. The film was never produced.

Death and commemoration

File:JolsonStamp.gif

This US stamp featuring Al Jolson was part of a series of stamps devoted to great singers

While playing cards, Jolson collapsed and died of a massive heart attack on October 23, 1950; his last words were said to be "Boys, I'm going." At the time of his death, he was staying at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Jolson was 64. He was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California, where a statue of Jolson beckons visitors to his crypt. His grave is extraordinarily ostentatious, even by Hollywood standards. On the day he died, Broadway dimmed its lights in Jolson's honor.

Al Jolson has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame:

1. For his contribution to the motion picture industry at 6622 Hollywood Blvd.;
2. For his contribution to the recording industry at 1716 Vine St.;
3. For his contribution to the radio industry at 6750 Hollywood Blvd.

Forty-four years after Jolson's death, the United States Postal Service acknowledged his contribution by issuing a postage stamp in his honor. The 29-cent stamp was unveiled by Erle Jolson Krasna, Jolson's fourth wife, at a ceremony in New York City's Lincoln Center on September 1, 1994. This stamp was one of a series honoring popular American singers, which included Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Ethel Merman, and Ethel Waters.

Al Jolson Way in New York City.

In August 2006, Al Jolson had a street in New York named in his honor after nine years of attempts by the international Al Jolson Society [2].

Movies

• Mammy's Boy (1923) (unfinished)
• A Plantation Act (1926)
• The Jazz Singer (1927)
• The Singing Fool (1928)
• Hollywood Snapshots No. 11 (1929) (short subject)
• Sonny Boy (1929) (Cameo)
• Say It with Songs (1929)
• New York Nights (1929) (Cameo)
• Mammy (1930)
• Show Girl in Hollywood (1930) (Cameo)
• Big Boy (1930)
• Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933)
• Wonder Bar (1934)
• Go Into Your Dance (1935)
• Paramount Headliner: Broadway Highlights No. 1 (1935) (short subject)
• The Singing Kid (1936)
• Hollywood Handicap (1938) (short subject)
• Rose of Washington Square (1939)
• Hollywood Cavalcade (1939)
• Swanee River (1939)
• Rhapsody in Blue (1945) (brief scene with Jolson in blackface introducing "Swanee")
• The Jolson Story (1946) (double and singing voice for Larry Parks with brief onscreen appearance)
• Screen Snapshots: Off the Air (1947) (short subject)
• Jolson Sings Again (1949) (singing voice for Larry Parks)
• Oh, You Beautiful Doll (1949) (voice only)
• Screen Snapshots: Hollywood's Famous Feet (1950) (short subject) (narrator)

Theater

• La Belle Paree (1911)
• Vera Violetta (1911)
• The Whirl of Society (1912)
• The Honeymoon Express (1913)
• Children of the Ghetto (before 1915)
• Robinson Crusoe, Jr. (1916)
• Sinbad (1918)
• Bombo (1921)
• Big Boy (1925)
• Artists and Models of 1925 (1925) (added to cast in 1926)
• Big Boy (1926) (revival)
• The Wonder Bar (1931)
• Hold on to Your Hats (1940)

Famous songs

• That Haunting Melodie (1911) Jolson's first hit.
• Ragging the Baby to Sleep (1912)
• The Spaniard That Blighted My Life (1912)
• That Little German Band (1913)
• You Made Me Love You (1913)
• Back to the Carolina You Love (1914)
• Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula (1916)
• I Sent My Wife to the Thousand Isles (1916)
• I'm All Bound Round With the Mason Dixon Line (1918)
• Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody (1918)
• Tell That to the Marines (1919)
• I'll Say She Does (1919)
• I've Got My Captain Working for Me Now (1919)
• Swanee (1920)
• Avalon (1920)
• O-H-I-O (O-My! O!) (1921)
• April Showers (1921)
• Angel Child (1922)
• Coo Coo' (1922)
• Oogie Oogie Wa Wa (1922)
• That Wonderful Kid From Madrid (1922)
• Toot, Toot, Tootsie (1922)
• Juanita (1923)
• California, Here I Come (1924)
• I Wonder What's Become of Sally? (1924)
• All Alone (1925)
• I'm Sitting on Top of the World (1926)
• When the Red, Red, Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along (1926)
• My Mammy (1927)
• Back in Your Own Backyard (1928)
• There's a Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder (1928)
• Sonny Boy (1928)
• Little Pal (1929)
• Liza (All the Clouds'll Roll Away) (1929)
• Let Me Sing and I'm Happy (1930)
• The Cantor (A Chazend'l Ofn Shabbos) (1932)
• You Are Too Beautiful (1933)
• Ma Blushin' Rosie (1946)
• Anniversary Song (1946)
• Alexander's Ragtime Band (1947)
• Carolina in the Morning (1947)
• About a Quarter to Nine (1947)
• Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (1947)
• Golden Gate (1947)
• When You Were Sweet Sixteen (1947)
• If I Only Had a Match (1947)
• After You've Gone (1949)
• Is It True What They Say About Dixie? (1949)
• Are You Lonesome Tonight? (1950)

Listen to

• Zoot Radio: The Al Jolson Show (Ten 1943-49 episodes)

Watch

• Al Jolson movie clip song compilation
• Al Jolson's video biography on YouTube

References

• Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-507678-8

[3]

External links

• Collected works of Al Jolson at the Internet Archive
• The International Al Jolson Society
• Mikes Jolson Site
• Al Jolson at Find-A-Grave
• Complete newsreel also covering Jolson's death and funeral (from the Internet Archive)