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, Mandy Patinkin, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Jr., Eddie Fisher, Jerry Lewis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Michael Jackson, Rufus Wainwright, 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 performed. In contrast, Jolson displayed tremendous energy using dynamic gestures and other movement. Jolson was the first entertainer to have 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 before.

Jolson was known to stop major Broadway productions in which he was performing, turn to the audience and ask them if they would rather hear him sing instead of watching the rest of the play. The answer was always a resounding yes, and Jolson would spend at least the next hour singing an impromptu concert. His friend George Burns said, "...Jolson was all show business!"

Early life and career

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sheet music, 1919

Al Jolson was born Asa Yoelson in Seredžius, Lithuania. The exact date of his birth is unknown but it is believed to have been May 26 1886. However, when Jolson sailed aboard the S.S. President Adams in 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; however, Jolson in later years admitted that his father was really a slaughterer or "shochet" of kosher animals, as well as performing circumcisions or "bris" in the role of a "mohel".

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sheet music, 1924

Young Asa became a popular singer in New York City 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 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 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 him or her.

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 number of sources to estimate music hits between 1890 and 1954: Talking Machine World's list of top-selling recordings; Billboard's own sheet music; and vaudeville charts. The results showed that 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 its origin in the minstrel show. Although popular at the time, many African-Americans today find blackface offensive. Al Jolson was the most famous performer to use blackface and thus is sometimes used as an example of whites propagating racial stereotypes in film. However, Jolson's blackface characters were always the star performers, as opposed to simple minstrel singers. Since leading black performers were unheard of at that time, either on stage or in movies, his blackface character would not actually be considered a stereotype.

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postage stamp from Mali, Africa

Jolson first saw and heard African-American music, such as jazz, blues, and ragtime, played in the back alleys of New Orleans. He greatly enjoyed singing that new jazz-style of music, so it's not surprising that he often performed in blackface, especially songs he made popular, like Swanee, Mammy, and Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody . In most of his movie roles, however, including a singing hobo in Hallelujah, I'm a Bum or a jailed convict in Say It With Songs, he chose to act without using blackface. In the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, he performed only a few songs, including My Mammy, in blackface, although there was nothing in the storyline that required a black singer. Apparently, Jolson had wide discretion over when and where to use blackface.

Some reviewers feel that Jolson's use of blackface was most likely intended as an act of anti-racism. As a Jewish immigrant and America's most famous and highest paid entertainer, he clearly had the incentive and resources to help break down racial attitudes. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) for instance, during its peak in the early 1920s, included about 15% of the nation's eligible population, 4-5 million men. While D.W. Griffith created the movie The Birth of a Nation, which glorified white supremacy and the KKK, Jolson gave us The Jazz Singer, which defied racial bigotry by introducing American black music to white audiences worldwide.

Movies

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premiere of The Jazz Singer

In the first part of the 20th century, Al Jolson was without question the most popular performer on Broadway and in vaudeville. 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 Jazz Singer (1927), the first nationally distributed feature film that included dialogue sequences as well as music and sound effects. This historic movie was made available on DVD in 2007.

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movie poster, 1927

The film 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 moviegoers were electrified when the action was interrupted periodically for a Vitaphone song sequence with synchronized sound. Jolson's dynamic voice, physical mannerisms, and charisma held the audience spellbound. The irrepressible Jolson insisted on improvising incidental dialogue, and for the first time, moviegoers could hear a spoken conversation. Jolson ad-libs freely while singing "Blue Skies", explaining how he's going to move his mother to a better neighborhood when he becomes successful. (Nobody on the set was ready for Jolson's ramblings, and the actress playing the mother, Eugenie Besserer, did her best to hide her surprise.) It was the talking, not the music as the Warners had expected, 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 in between. So close is this to an actual stage act that Jolson returns for two curtain calls afterwards. This Jolson short was the key attraction in Warners' second theatrical demonstration of Vitaphone. Historians such as Donald Crafton, author of 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 whetting the public taste for talking films.

A Plantation Act was considered lost as far back as 1933 (Jolson requested a print and was told 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. Included with the Warner Home Video DVD of The Jazz Singer, the short contains almost as much dialogue as the later feature.

With Warner Bros., 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, until broken by Gone with the Wind.

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Al Jolson in blackface.

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.^[1] (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.

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Go Into Your Dance, 1935

Returning to Warners, Jolson bowed 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 number by E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen titled "I Love to Singa," and a comedy sequence 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.

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 remained very popular both in America and abroad, and was dubbed the world's greatest entertainer. He contributed millions to Jewish and other charities in his will.[[1]].

Jolson's personal life
with wife Erle

with wife Erle
with Charlie Chaplin

with Charlie Chaplin
performing at a Tokyo hospital, 1949

performing at a Tokyo hospital, 1949
with Calvin Coolidge, 1924
with Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante, 1935

with Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante, 1935

The Jolson Story

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Jolson with Larry Parks

After the success of the George M. Cohan film biography, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky believed that a similar film could be made about Al Jolson struggling to use chopsticks for the very first time -- and he knew just where to pitch the project. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, loved the music of Al Jolson. He knew that Jolson had been one of America's most well-known and popular entertainers.

Skolsky pitched the idea of an Al Jolson biopic and Cohn agreed. It was directed by Alfred E. Green (best known today for the pre-Code masterpiece Baby Face), with musical numbers staged by Joseph H. Lewis. 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, "Swanee," shot entirely in long shot, with Jolson in blackface singing and dancing onto the runway leading into the middle of the theater.

The Jolson Story and its sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949) introduced a whole new generation to Jolson's voice and charisma. Both movies are currently available on DVD. Jolson, who had been a popular guest star on radio since its earliest days, got his own show, hosting the Kraft Music Hall from 1947 to 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

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magazine story, 1950

While playing cards in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, Jolson collapsed and died of a massive heart attack on October 23, 1950. His last words were said to be "Boys, I'm going." Jolson was 64. He was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California, where his mausoleum has a statue of Jolson at its entrance.

On the day he died, Broadway dimmed its lights in Jolson's honor.

Jolson has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame:

at 6622 Hollywood Blvd. for his contribution to motion pictures
at 1716 Vine St. for his mark on the recording industry
at 6750 Hollywood Blvd. for his achievements in radio

Forty-four years after Jolson's death, the United States Postal Service honored him by issuing a postage stamp. 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.

In August 2006, Al Jolson had a street in New York named after him after nine years of attempts by the international Al Jolson Society.