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Al Jolson
Billed as the 'World's Greatest Entertainer".
Background information
Birth name	Asa Yoelson
Born	May 26, 1886, Seredžius, Lithuania
Died	October 23, 1950, San Francisco, California
Genre(s)	Vaudeville Pop standards Jazz Pop
Years active	1911–1950
Label(s)	Columbia Brunswick Decca
Website	The Al Jolson Society

Asa "Al Jolson" Yoelson (May 26, 1886 – October 23, 1950) was an acclaimed American singer and actor 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 and Eddie Fisher.

Contents 1 Early life and career 2 Radio 3 The Jolson Story 4 Death 5 Trivia 6 Movies 7 Theater 8 Famous songs 9 Listen to 10 References 11 External links

Jolson was born in Seredzius, Lithuania, as Asa Yoelson. 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. Al's father became the Rabbi of the Talmud Torah Synagogue (now Ohev Sholom Talmud Torah), in Washington, D.C.

Jolson 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. He gradually developed the key elements of his performance: blackface makeup; exuberant gestures; operatic-style singing; whistling; 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 is unmatched for its length and popularity, spanning close to thirty 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 forty-five 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.

However, Jolson is best known today for his appearance in one of the first "talkies", The Jazz Singer, the first feature film with sound to enjoy wide commercial success, in 1927. In The Jazz Singer Jolson performed the song "Mammy" in blackface. In truth, Jolson's singing should not be considered as jazz, as his style remained forever rooted in the vaudeville stage at the turn of 20th century.

Signing with the Warners for a series of "speakies", Jolson made 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 three million copies.

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 music artist to sell over ten 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.

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 to actress/dancer 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.

After leaving the Broadway stage, Jolson starred on radio. The Al Jolson Show aired 1933-1939, 1942-1943 and 1947-1949. These programs were typically rated in the top ten. In 1950, Jolson signed with CBS Television, but died in October of that year before any broadcasts could be initiated.

After the success of Warner Bros. film Yankee Doodle Dandy about George M. Cohan, 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,) 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 actor 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."

Jolson's legacy is considered by many to be severely neglected today because of his use of stage blackface. Jolson was not a racist, and blackface as a theatrical convention was used by many performers (both white and black); some critics argue the make-up acted as a mask for Jolson, giving his performances a greater spontaneity. However, the make-up had roots in Minstrelry shows (where Jolson got his start, though it should be noted he was never considered a Minstrel performer) and is today viewed by many as racially insensitive. It can also be disputed that Jolson wore blackface to act as if he was in fact an African American singer. Jolson was billed as "The World's Greatest Entertainer", which is how many of the greatest stars (including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Rod Stewart, Jackie Wilson) referred to him. Charles Chaplin wrote in his Autobiography that Jolson was one of the most electrifying entertainers he had ever seen. A life-long devotion to entertaining American servicemen (he first sang for servicemen of the Spanish-American War as a boy in Washington, D.C.) led Jolson, against the advice of his doctors, to entertain troops in Korea in 1950, when his heart began to fail.

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 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 lowered its lights for ten minutes 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.

• Jolson was the focus of the highly successful, award-winning West End production Jolson The Musical.
• Al Jolson is one of Mr. Burns' (from The Simpsons) favorite actors. Burns believes that Jolson is still alive.
• A song that Jolson helped make famous, "I'm Sitting on Top of the World", was played during the opening montage of 1930s New York City in the 2005 remake of King Kong and during the closing sequence of the 1995 U.S. - U.K. film Richard III.
• 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 [1].
• Al Jolson is mentioned in Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress at Walt Disney World.
• Jolson ad-libbed his best-known catchphrase, "You ain't heard nothing yet!", in The Jazz Singer. It is also the name of a song he co-wrote earlier.
• Charles Chaplin wanted Jolson to record "This is My Song" from his film The Countess from Hong Kong. It wasn't until he was shown a photo of his grave that he was convinced Jolson had died and he offered the tune to his neighbor Petula Clark instead.

• 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)
• 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)

• 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)

• 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)
• Back in Your Own Backyard (1928)
• My Mammy (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)
• 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)

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

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

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