June 13, 2002

Al Jolson's blackface performances were the product of a racist society, and insofar as Jolson reflected that society, a racist man. His was a demeaning depiction of African-Americans that served to reinforce the stereotype of the happy, singing-and-dancing darkie.
      But for all their racist baggage there was also in Jolson's performances a vigorous appreciation of African-derived singing styles. Blackface Vaudeville was the result not only of the white exploitation of a black style, but also of a rich interchange between the two. Blackface was performed by black performers also, performers who at times parodied their white counterparts. This is part of what critic Henry Pleasants calls "that process of imitation and counterimitation--black imitating white, and white imitating black imitating white--through which, beginning with ragtime and even earlier, African musicality was entering the mainstream of Western music in America." Al Jolson is the godfather of Bob Dylan and Eminem.
      Al Jolson is what we today call "white," but it is useful to remember that, as a Jew and the son Russian immigrants, this is a designation that was granted to Jolson in his time only partially. Americans of more established ethnicities looked upon Jolson as little better than a black man. Indeed, one of the reasons why Jews so dominated the entertainment industry (virtually every major Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriter was Jewish) was that it was one of the few areas of employment relatively free of anti-Semitism.
      There is another possible reason for Al Jolson's attraction to a black style of singing, or rather to his version thereof. One theory is that Africans and Eastern European Jews in America accommodated themselves to the Western diatonic scale in similar ways. Devices in Jolson's singing such as slurring and sliding between notes, common in blues and jazz singing, may have been ways to reach for the semitones of a musical homeland. These devices might have been arrived at independently by both groups of new arrivals. It is possible that what we hear as African in the "blue note" has in it also something cantorial.
      Al Jolson was the product of collisions and contradictions. He both lead and was was left behind by technological revolutions in popular music. His performances were joyful, but the product of great unhappiness. His singing was both an homage and an infamous insult to an ethnic group with whom he more thoughtfully might have found solidarity. Jolson's singing offers a keynote to American twentieth century popular music: the sometimes violent meeting of ethnic worlds, out of which emerges something both fabulously energetic and shamelessly sentimental.