Al Jolson, the voice that made the movies talk and the mask it wore

Al Jolson

Photo: Film studio / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 26, 1886 Seredžius, Lithuania
Died	October 23, 1950 (64)
Occupation	Singer and actor
Known for	The Jazz Singer
Awards	Medal · Hollywood Walk of Fame · American Theater Hall of Fame

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” Al Jolson had been throwing that promise at Broadway audiences for years, a showman’s line before an encore, and in The Jazz Singer he said it again, this time into a Vitaphone microphone. Audiences used to silent actors heard a man talk to them from the screen, and they shouted back. Hollywood never returned to silence.

The trouble is the face he wore while it happened. The film’s final number finds him on one knee in burnt-cork makeup, singing “My Mammy”, the minstrel mask he had worn on stage since his teens. The voice that carried the movies into sound belongs to the performer critics now call the king of blackface performers. Both facts sit in the same reel, and an honest account of Jolson has to hold them together, because he never pulled them apart himself.

He began as Asa Yoelson in Srednike, a Jewish village near Kaunas that is now Seredžius in Lithuania and was then part of the Russian Empire. No record of his birth survives; biographers place it around May 26, 1886, and Jolson gave the year as 1885. His father, a rabbi and cantor, sailed for America in 1891 and found work in Washington, D.C.; the family followed in 1894. Within a year his mother was dead. Asa and his older brother Hirsch, who became Harry, sang for coins on street corners and spent the money on theatre tickets.

The road out ran through a circus sideshow, burlesque and years of vaudeville. In a Brooklyn theatre in 1904 he first blacked up, found that audiences responded, and wore the makeup in every show after that. He joined Lew Dockstader’s Minstrels in 1909, and in 1911 the Shubert brothers put him into La Belle Paree at the Winter Garden in New York. Within a month he was a star.

For the next decade Broadway ran on his energy. Sinbad, in 1918, added “Swanee”, George Gershwin’s first hit record, and “My Mammy”. Bombo opened in 1921 in a theatre the Shuberts had renamed Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre, making him, at 35, the youngest man in American history with a theatre named after him. Stage fright took his voice before the first performance; he still took 37 curtain calls, and the show gave him “California, Here I Come”.

Warner Bros. had first wanted George Jessel, who played the part on stage, for The Jazz Singer. When Sam Warner decided to make it a Vitaphone musical, Jessel balked at singing and Jolson took the role. The film was mostly silent, with synchronized sound only in the songs and a few bursts of patter, and that was enough. The Singing Fool did even better the next year, and its “Sonny Boy” became the first American record to sell a million copies. Then the returns thinned: Mammy and the features around it repeated the formula while his salary stayed enormous and the public tired of vaudeville on film.

His best film of the 1930s is the one least like the others. Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933), directed by Lewis Milestone from a Ben Hecht script, had no mammy song, as The New York Times noted with some relief before calling it his best picture. Wonder Bar paired him with Kay Francis and Dolores del Río. By The Singing Kid in 1936 he no longer had star billing, and in Rose of Washington Square (1939) he was billed third, behind Alice Faye and Tyrone Power.

The case for Jolson has always rested on his conduct away from the footlights, and that conduct is documented. When he read that the songwriters Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle had been refused service at a Connecticut restaurant, he tracked them down and took them to dinner. In 1924 he promoted Garland Anderson’s Appearances, the first Broadway production with an all-Black cast. On The Singing Kid he told Harold Arlen to let Cab Calloway sing his own way. None of it dissolves the act. The dialect and the burnt cork sold a caricature of Black Americans to white audiences, and by 1938 Sissle himself was calling the routine humiliating. The music critic Ted Gioia put it bluntly in 2000: “If blackface has its shameful poster boy, it is Al Jolson.” The generosity and the mask belong to the same career, and the mask is what audiences paid for.

By the end of the 1930s his starring career had stalled and his third wife, the dancer Ruby Keeler, had left him. The war gave him a purpose. In 1942 he became the first star to perform at a GI base, and he toured camps from Britain to Alaska, often paying his own way, until malaria caught in the Pacific cost him his left lung. Then Columbia’s The Jolson Story (1946) cast Larry Parks as Jolson and dubbed him with Jolson’s own voice, which Variety said had never been better. It was one of the year’s biggest hits, and Parks earned an Oscar nomination. Jolson Sings Again followed in 1949, and a 1948 Variety poll named him the most popular male vocalist in a field that included Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

In September 1950, married by then to his fourth wife, Erle Galbraith, he flew to Korea at his own expense and gave 42 shows in 16 days. On October 23 he died of a heart attack while playing cards in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. He was 64. Defense Secretary George Marshall awarded him the Medal for Merit posthumously. His tomb in Culver City, designed by the Black architect Paul Williams, carries a bronze Jolson on one knee, arms out, about to sing “Mammy” once more.

His influence ran further than his reputation. Crosby said that within the first eight bars Jolson had an audience in the palm of his hand. Jackie Wilson argued that he should be seen as the stylistic forefather of rock and roll, and Judy Garland built her 1951 Palladium comeback around an impersonation of him. Richard Bernstein’s 2024 book Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer went back to the film and to the blackface question, and in May this year Seredžius marked the 140th anniversary of his birth with a concert outside its former synagogue and a commemorative bench.

The Jazz Singer turns 100 on October 6, 2027. The centenary cannot be celebrated cleanly, and that may be the most accurate tribute it could receive: the moment the movies learned to talk arrived in blackface, and remembering it properly means saying both things out loud.