Listen No. 21 - The Al Jolson Souvenir Album

Record Number 21: The Al Jolson Souvenir Album

Genre: Jazz, blues, ragtime

Context:   The second album of Jolsoniana from Decca Records, and released in 1947 (a year after the film The Jazz Singer brought Jolson back from obscurity). The discs here are almost as thick as dinner plates, and these may be the first 78s I’ve ever played. See here for a short history of the 78.

I think this set may have belonged to Richard Green’s parents, but I can’t be sure. Richard was definitely a Jolson fan, and we watched both versions of The Jazz Singer together.

 Notable facts:  When Jolson died in in 1950, Alistair Cooke wrote -

‘Al Jolson died in San Francisco last night too late to hit the headlines of the morning papers, but in the evening papers to-day he swept everything before him, including President Truman at the fifth anniversary of the United Nations.

At sixty-four he was the luckiest man in show business. He went from minstrel show to blackface, from vaudeville to Broadway before he hit a fabulous prosperity as the most sentimental of all sentimental singers, a poor Russian cantor's son daubed with burnt cork and down on one knee sobbing for the "mammy" he had never known in a south that nobody ever knew.’

 The whole obituary is well worth reading:

My favourite track:  Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goo’bye). Joyous. There’s also a disco version by Jerry Vale:

What critics made of it: The two Decca sets were huge sellers.

Listening to this inspired me to: Invest some time in the detail of Jolson’s life, as it’s fascinating and complex. So I’ve ordered Michael Freedland’s Jolson.