Mammy Dearest
Richard Bernstein’s new book about Al Jolson and ‘The Jazz Singer’ offers a thoughtful reconsideration of an unfairly reviled cultural landmark.
A review of Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer by Richard Bernstein, 252 pages (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024)
Shortly after sunset on the evening of 6 October 1927, 1,400 people converged on the Warner theatre in Manhattan to watch history being made. At first, the motion picture being projected seemed fairly ordinary—a run-of-the-mill family melodrama, performed in silent pantomime, just like every other feature film before it. All that changed fourteen minutes into the show when the protagonist suddenly burst into song. The lyrics were not carried in title cards but by a merry, fluting tenor audible to everyone in attendance. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he chirped when the song was done. “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”
That line was delivered in character, but it could also have been addressed directly to the audience, who immediately began hooting and cheering. “It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences,” the film director Frank Capra recalled. “A vision ... a voice that came out of a shadow.” By the time the film was over, the crowd were cheering and stamping their feet until the star walked down the aisle to bask in their applause. Film producer Walter Wanger ran to the phone to call his boss Jesse Lasky in California. “Jesse,” he cried, “this is a revolution!” The era of talking pictures had arrived.
The film shown that night was, of course, The Jazz Singer, and its star was the great vaudeville performer Al Jolson. For decades, filmmakers had tried (and failed) to make movies talk. The stumbling block was synchronisation. Even Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph and the motion-picture camera, couldn’t get his gizmos to harmonise for more than a few minutes at a time.
In 1924, the engineers at Western Electric finally licked the problem... sort of. That May, they unveiled their newest invention, an unwieldy contraption the size of a Bugatti engine that yoked a turntable to a movie projector. It wasn’t pretty to look at, but it did what no one had been able to do before: marry sounds and images. Unfortunately, it was a nightmare to operate. Though The Jazz Singer was only 89 minutes long, its soundtrack consumed fifteen discs, each of which had to be synced to a corresponding reel of film. Had the projectionist failed to cue up a disc at precisely the right moment, the premiere might have been a disaster.
Curiously, in his new book Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer, Richard Bernstein devotes just two short paragraphs to this epochal event, though he does mention that tickets cost a whopping five US dollars. (For that amount of money, a person could have bought a three-course dinner at Delmonico’s, the swanky New York restaurant frequented by F. Scott Fitzgerald.) Nor does Bernstein spend much time on the technical wizardry of the film, which felt as uncanny to people in the 1920s as artificial intelligence feels to us today. Bernstein dwells instead on the racial politics of The Jazz Singer—a focus that will, no doubt, make some readers groan.
If there’s one thing our public discourse hasn’t been short of lately, it is discussions about racial identity, often conducted by hucksters like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, who perpetuate the very bigotry they claim to abhor. I am happy to report, however, this isn’t that kind of book, Bernstein isn’t that kind of author, and in the case of The Jazz Singer, the discussion is merited and thoughtful. As John Strausbaugh pointed out in his superb 2006 book Black Like You, “The Jazz Singer is at least as remarkable for the story it tells as for the technical revolution it signaled. ... [Its] story is nothing less than a microcosm of the entire American project: the creation of an American Culture out of the disparate elements of many ethnic and racial subgroups.”
Which isn’t to say the story is good, exactly. The plot is pure schmaltz. The protagonist, a Jewish boy named Jakie Rabinowitz (Jolson), yearns to be a jazz singer, much to the consternation of his father (Warner Oland), a fifth-generation cantor who demands that Jakie follow in his footsteps. One day, the old man catches his son singing in a saloon. They fight, Jakie runs away, and when we meet him again, he’s a grown man working as a nightclub singer under the stage name Jack Robin. Though he hasn’t spoken to his father in years, he’s stayed in touch with his mother (Eugenie Besserer), who cherishes every one of his letters home.
Back in New York for his Broadway debut, Jack stops by his parents’ apartment to attempt a reconciliation, but when his father sees what he’s become, he throws him out, aghast that his son has chosen jazz over the songs of ancient Israel. The turning point occurs on the day of Jack’s premiere, which happens to be the eve of Yom Kippur. His mother comes to see him backstage bearing bad news: his father is sick, too sick to sing the “Kol Nidre” that night. The only thing that will heal the old man’s soul is if Jack takes his place in the synagogue. This leaves Jack with an agonising dilemma. If he skips the premiere, he’ll kill his career. If he skips the Jewish High Holidays, he’ll feel responsible for the death of his father.
In the end, filial duty triumphs. The Broadway show is cancelled and Jack sings the “Kol Nidre,” his voice carrying all the way to his father’s deathbed in the building next door. “Mama,” the cantor says to his wife as he dies with a smile on his lips, “we have our son again.” All, however, is not lost for Jack Robin. Broadway also forgives him, and that’s where we find him in the final scene, made up in blackface, singing “My Mammy” before a huge crowd. Though there are hundreds of people in attendance, we know that he’s really just singing to his mother, who sits beaming in the front row. She alone has loved him unconditionally ever since he was a boy and understood that, for him, jazz was his religion.
As contrived as this story seems, it was actually fairly true to Jolson’s own life. Born Asa Yoelson, he was close to his mother but struggled to relate to his father, an Eastern European cantor who insisted that, one day, little Asa would be a cantor, too. “The chief difficulty in our home life,” Jolson’s brother Harry later recalled, “was that Al and I had been absorbed by American customs, American freedom of thought, and the American way of life. My father still dwelt in the consciousness of the strict, orthodox teachings and customs of the old world.”
Al and Harry preferred American music and began singing on street corners around the turn of the century when they were still young boys. At the age of twelve, Al joined a vaudeville troupe, and by his mid-twenties, he was earning US$500 a week. By the time he turned thirty, that figure had climbed into the thousands. When he sang, his whole body sang—hips swaying, eyes popping, arms outstretched as though he were expecting a hug. Samson Raphaelson, who wrote the play upon which The Jazz Singer was based, called Jolson “the most electric theatrical personality I’d ever encountered.” Audiences especially loved his blackface routines, during which he seemed to pour his entire being into every song.
But time has not been as kind to Jolson and The Jazz Singer as his contemporaries were. A few years ago, as the #MeToo movement began to cool off and America’s so-called racial reckoning began to heat up, there was a brief moment when blackface scandals were all over the news. It started with TV host Megyn Kelly, who waxed nostalgic about the good old days when it was still acceptable for children to blacken their faces on Halloween. Then Virginia Governor Ralph Northam got busted for either wearing blackface or a Klan robe (the caption isn’t clear) in a yearbook photo from the 1980s. He probably would have lost his job but for the fact that the man who was in line to succeed him, Attorney General Mark Herring, admitted that he had also worn blackface in college.
Zaid Jilani
Additional revelations ensued, followed by denunciations, profuse apologies, and, naturally, plenty of think-pieces. “Blackface is so thoroughly associated with the worst of American racism that we should expect immediate condemnation of politicians and public figures who have any association with it, even if it’s a decades-old offense,” wrote Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times. Jane Coaston—then at Vox, now at the Times—went even further, arguing that no distinction should be made between the derogatory blackface of Northam’s yearbook photo and the type of satirical blackface that actress Sarah Silverman employed in an early-2000s comedy sketch, in which her character is made to look stupid for blackening her skin.
It was the politically conservative firebrand Ben Shapiro, of all people, who decided to throw Al Jolson under the bus. “Blackface is racist,” he told Coaston, discussing Northam, Herring, and the celebrity Luann de Lesseps, who’d once dressed up as Diana Ross for Halloween. “Putting on makeup to dress up as Diana Ross is racially insensitive at best and racist at worst, but isn’t equivalent to Al Jolson singing ‘Mammy,’ which is unmistakably and obviously malicious racism.”
2. There are degrees of racist activity. All are bad. Not all are equivalent. This is not Al Jolson-style blackface, but it’s not good.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 20, 2019
Interestingly, black people in the 1920s didn’t think so. As Bernstein points out, the black press widely hailed The Jazz Singer when it was first released. “This epic screen version of racial inclination offers one of the greatest lessons of modern times,” wrote the critic for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the country’s leading African American newspapers. The reviewer at the New York Amsterdam News was equally enthusiastic, calling the film “one of the greatest pictures ever produced” and describing Jolson as “one of the world’s greatest performers.” As was the reviewer for the Washington Tribune: “Seen it? Heard it? If not, you’d better, because if you miss it, you’ll miss the treat of your life.”
It could be that African Americans were simply so overwhelmed by the novelty of sound that they were prepared to overlook the racial insensitivity. Or perhaps, having grown up in a period when lynchings were common, they didn’t think it worth noting this comparatively minor transgression. Today, the standard explanation for why Jews like Jolson wore blackface is that this is how “whiteness” operates. Newly arrived immigrants—Jews, Italians, Irishmen, etc.—faced discrimination when they first came to the US but eventually became white by joining established groups picking on blacks. Though Bernstein gives this theory due consideration, he points out that it doesn’t apply to The Jazz Singer. Jolson wasn’t a white man playing a black man, like the actors who portrayed the villains in D.W. Griffiths’s notorious 1915 cinematic landmark The Birth of a Nation. He was a white man playing a white man who sings in blackface.
To properly appreciate this distinction, it is helpful to know a bit about the history of minstrelsy, which was first popularised nearly a century before by the singer Thomas Dartmouth Rice. One evening in 1832, at the Bowery theatre in lower Manhattan, Rice put on some tattered clothes, slathered his skin with burnt cork till it was the colour of mahogany, and performed a dance that he claimed to have learned from an old black man in Louisville, Kentucky. He called the character Jim Crow. The crowd loved it, and Rice’s blackface act soon became a national sensation. Actors and acting troupes all over the country began darkening their faces and performing minstrel songs and sketches. Abraham Lincoln was a fan, as were Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.
Minstrel acts were often bigoted, deriding blacks as dumb “coons” and jolly, big-bellied “mammies.” But not all of them were. Some were simply frivolous. Others played to city dwellers’ romantic notions of country life. It’s no coincidence that minstrelsy peaked in popularity at the same time that America was experiencing a period of rapid industrialisation. As cities expanded and factories rose, befouling rivers and darkening the sky, a wave of nostalgia swept the nation—a longing for a simpler time, before the country was overtaken by modernity. Minstrel shows, with their rustic settings, lazy characters, and sweet, adoring mothers, scratched that itch.
These shows also provided an outlet for otherwise inexpressible feelings. Nineteenth-century men were not supposed to be emotional, particularly after the Civil War. Perhaps to compensate for the heroic battles they’d missed, the sons and younger brothers of the war generation dialled up their machismo. Football and bare-knuckle boxing became popular sports. Gunfighters like Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, and Wild Bill Hickok were lionised. Public displays of tears were frowned upon... except in the theatre, where actors and audiences could turn on the waterworks. “Everyone knew that there were those who came to a minstrel show to cry as well as to laugh,” the minstrel songwriter W.C. Handy later explained. “Ladies of that mauve decade [the 1890s] were likely to follow the plot of a song with much the same sentimental interest that their daughters show in the development of a movie theme nowadays. The tenors were required to tell the stories that jerked the tears.”
Whites weren’t the only ones caught up in this new fad (if you can call something that lasts more than a century a “fad”). Handy was African American, as were many minstrel performers. All-black troupes like McCabe & Young’s Minstrels, Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels, and Richards & Pringle’s Georgia Minstrels drew in spectators, both black and white, by the thousands. As Bernstein points out, “There were complaints about blackface in the 1910s and 1920s in the main Black newspapers like The Pittsburgh Courier, The Chicago Defender, and the New York Amsterdam News, but the complaints weren’t so much that blackface was an insult; they were that whites had stolen blackface and were being more successful at it than Blacks were.”
What drew blacks to blackface? Steady work, for one thing. Good money, for another. Neither was readily available to African Americans at the time. But minstrel shows offered something else that all actors love, regardless of race: a disguise. Beneath the burnt cork mask, a person could lose himself, shedding any trace of embarrassment that might hinder him onstage. Bert Williams, the most famous African American actor of his generation, recalled how blackface helped him come into his own as a performer. One day in 1895 or ’96, “just for a lark,” he smeared on blackface makeup in a Detroit theatre: “Nobody was more surprised than I was when it went like a house on fire. Then I began to find myself. It was not until I was able to see myself as another person that my sense of humor developed.”
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
Jolson had a remarkably similar experience. Despite his early success, he worried that he wasn’t achieving all that he could on the stage. “I was not creating the riotous enthusiasm I wanted to create,” he told the Washington Tribune. Then, one night, a black assistant at a theatre in Brooklyn suggested Jolson put on some blackface. “With his encouragement,” Jolson said, “I tried out the experiment on a theater audience, and the change was so well received, that I have clung to the characterization ever since.”
The blackface disguise was especially appealing to Jews, who, like blacks, were still generally excluded from “respectable” society. Jolson’s best-known blackface character was a wiseacre named Gus, whom he first played onstage and later brought to the screen in the early 1930s. As Bernstein explains:
[Gus] was very different from a Zip Coon or a Jim Crow, and even from Amos ’n’ Andy of later years. He was, to be sure, an outsider. But he was a shrewd outsider who felt no inferiority compared to the insiders, and, indeed, understood their game, and he manipulated it for his own benefit and for the benefit of what was good and just as well. The character wasn’t intended to be a disguised piece of political or racial commentary, but the underlying message of Jolson’s impersonation was one of equality in which Jews and Blacks, both outsiders, punctured the pretentious self-satisfaction of the insiders’ world.
Black audiences were not offended by Jolson’s blackface routine, they loved it. According to one biographer, Jolson was the only white man ever admitted to Leroy’s, the black cabaret on 135th Street in Harlem. Jolson returned the favour, showing great respect for black artists. When he heard that composer Eubie Blake and lyricist Noble Sissle had been turned away from a restaurant that refused to serve blacks, he invited them to dine with him that night. When the black singer Florence Mills died, Jolson sang a solo at her funeral.
By the late 1920s, though, blackface was in decline. Even before The Jazz Singer was released, vaudeville was already haemorrhaging cash, as audiences poured into movie houses. The arrival of talking pictures simply put it out of its misery. Jolson was clearly aware of this when he appeared in the movie, which is one reason why the blackface scenes in the film feel so elegiac. In the same way that early minstrel songs expressed nostalgia for a bucolic world that had vanished, The Jazz Singer expressed nostalgia for the vanishing world of vaudeville.
The irony was that, at the same time the movie was eulogising vaudeville, it was also driving a stake into its heart. When Hollywood discovered how to make movies talk, it robbed the stage of the last advantage it had over the screen. Among the many people hurt by the arrival of sound was Al Jolson himself. “The consensus,” Bernstein writes, “was that the full Jolson experience could only be enjoyed live and in person.” By ushering in sound, Jolson effectively ushered himself off the stage.
Bernstein’s writing can be clichéd and clunky at times. Sententious statements creep in now and then, such as this one from the preface: “More broadly, there’s racism, poverty, and inequality, the heritage of our original sin of slavery, as well as gun violence, political discord, and shocking misbehavior, especially by a certain former president and his followers.” What this unnamed former president has to do with Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer, Bernstein doesn’t say, though one suspects that, like the allusion to “our original sin of slavery,” Bernstein brought him up simply to preempt an attack from the left.
Historical mistakes occasionally appear as well. “In the first half of the nineteenth century,” Bernstein writes, “when there were roughly fifteen thousand Jews in an overall American population of seventeen million, there was literally not a single piece of theater produced with a Jewish character.” Does he really expect us to believe that no one—not one acting troupe, not one English class—staged The Merchant of Venice between 1800 and 1850? The actor Junius Brutus Booth, the father of Lincoln’s assassin, was renowned for his sympathetic portrayal of Shylock during this period.
But these are minor quibbles, and Bernstein really ought to be commended for his handling of such a delicate subject. It takes some chutzpah, in this day and age, to declare that blackface is not always offensive and can even be subversive in the modern, politically progressive sense of the term. Yet Bernstein does so with sympathy and nuance. The Jazz Singer, he reminds us, shouldn’t only be appreciated for what it did—introduce sound into cinema—it should also be appreciated for what it is: a lens for understanding how Jews were seen (and saw themselves) in the early part of the 20th century. Despite the fact that nearly all the Hollywood studio heads in the 1920s were Jewish, few films had ever touched the subject of Jewish identity before, and none had dealt with it as explicitly as The Jazz Singer did.
Cinema has come a long way since then. Today, the acting in the film looks incredibly affected, better suited to the stage than the screen, and engineers long ago figured out how to print sound directly on celluloid, so projectionists wouldn’t have to deal with lips and voices getting knocked out of sync. But the picture raises a pertinent question: how does one assimilate into the wider culture while remaining true to one’s roots? It is a question that cuts to the heart of the American experience—one that immigrants still ask and will continue to ask, for years to come. Which is why, though The Jazz Singer may look (and even sound) old-fashioned, it still speaks to us today.
