‘Swanee’
Composer: George
Gershwin
Lyricist: Irving
Caesar
Performed by Al
Jolson
Recorded: January 8,
1920
2:34
For decades, male entertainers in America had two things – a
tuxedo and an Al Jolson impression. Anyone could get a laugh of recognition
simply by going down on one knee and calling out “Mammy!” The World’s Greatest
Entertainer was, for much of his career, precisely that.
Jolson was a performing marvel. At the time, vaudevillians
and variety artists hid their hunger for audience approval under a veneer of
stylish nonchalance. Compared to them, Jolson was a dynamo, a sweaty, energetic
pulse of naked need. He had big, rubbery facial features and a resonant voice,
both essential in being heard and seen in the farthest reaches of the
cavernous, unamplified theaters of the day. He was one of the first to treat
singing a song like he was acting out a three-minute playlet, to sing TO the
audience, not just at it. His energy was an embrace that theatergoers felt
obliged to return.
Jolson, the son of a rabbi, was born in Lithuania and
migrated to America with his family at a young age. Motherless at age 14, he
and his brother Harry began busking, singing in the streets for money. After 15
years on the road, Jolson finally opened a New York show as the lead in La Belle Paree in 1911. For then until
his stage retirement in 1926, he was the number one theatrical attraction in
the country.
He also worked in blackface. This was a holdover from the
tradition of the American minstrel show, which had seen its heyday from the
1840s through the end of the 19th century. Although rapidly becoming
an anachronism, the idea of a white man acting out the caricature of a black
man was still strong in, and acceptable to, the general audience. Jolson excelled
at “selling” songs, especially in wringing out all the pathos from sentimental
ballads, especially those by Stephen Foster, which were written expressly for minstrelsy
(“My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Folks at Home”). Part of the license for acting
out vulnerability and feeling onstage was, for many white performers of the
era, came from adopting a concept of blackness that was inseparable from identifying
it with childlike immaturity and a lack of emotional repression.
It’s painful now to see the incongruity of one ethnic
minority mocking another to make itself acceptable to the mainstream -- A Jew
playing a Negro for affluent white, largely Christian viewers. Jolson was not
unconscious of the dilemma, and went out of his way throughout his career to befriend
and stand up for black entertainers. Still, he made a fortune out of
singlehandedly perpetuating a demeaning, stereotypical representation of
blackness that otherwise might have died out much sooner.
At the edge of the Jazz Age, pop songs about the ‘dear old
South’ were still big. The legacy of Foster and other sentimental balladeers
was powerful, and the Victorian era was rife with maudlin nostalgia in vocal
music. Odes to times past, the rural homestead, and the balms of motherhood
filled the music racks of pianos across the land – particularly poignant in a
time when the American population was moving rapidly from farms to cities.
“Swanee” is the archetype of that kind of song. Jolson had a
hit two years earlier with the similar “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie
Melody,” and a year later would score again with “My Mammy,” but “Swanee” was
his biggest hit, selling two million records and more than a million copies of
the sheet music. Perhaps what distinguishes it is its composer – George
Gershwin.
The 20-year-old Gershwin wrote it for a 1919 revue, after
which it languished until Jolson heard Gershwin play it a party (some say at a
bordello). Gershwin had already been working for five years in Tin Pan Alley as
a song plugger, one of many who would demonstrate and promote new pieces for
performers and laymen alike. After the success of “Swanee,” his first and
biggest hit, Gershwin would focus on composing for the stage and the concert
hall for the rest of his short life.
The song is a perfect vehicle for Jolson’s style. Its lyrics
are typically plaintive and yearning, but they are couched in a springy,
energetic, propulsive melody utilizing percussive block chords. It is not
played as much as it is stamped out on the keys. The opening phrases charge up
the scale – “I’ve been away from you a long time/I never thought I’d miss you
so”; the next are framed in melodramatic staccato –“Somehow I feel/Your love
was real/Near you I long to be.”
For the chorus, the shift from minor to major key brightens
the tone, the repetitive “Swanee, how I love ya, how I love ya” like a freight
train chugging along. Gershwin makes a narrative out of the piece, again
turning to stair-step phrasing – “I’d give the world – to – be/Among the folks
– in – (and the payoff, in a falling phrase) D-I-X-I-E . . . “ It’s easy to
remember, infectiously singable.
The bridge brings in quotations from earlier songs – the
explicit “I love the old folks at home” phrase from Foster, but also in its use
of a subtle musical paraphrase of “Listen to the Mockingbird,” an 1855 gem,
which can easily be hummed along in harmony with “Swanee, Swanee/ I am coming
back to Swanee.” (If remembered at all today, “Mockingbird” is as the opening
theme music, in parodic form, for the Three Stooges shorts.)
By song’s end, it’s become a triumphal celebration of
return, a glorious anticipation of trouble no more, almost a march. No wonder
it was a hit. Despite its racist connotations, you can’t deny it’s a nifty
piece of work.
Jolson gradually weaned himself away from blackface, but not
before performing in it in the first sound feature film, The Jazz Singer, in 1927, and again and again in special
appearances in film and on radio.
At his memorial shrine at Hillside Memorial Park in Los
Angeles, a bronze statue of Jolson shows him on one knee, hands spread, just as
he posed on stage at the end of belting his crowd-pleasing songs. You can’t
tell if he’s wearing blackface or not.
The National Recording Registry
Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the
National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: William Jennings Bryan recreates his 1896 'Cross of Gold' speech.
No comments:
Post a Comment