Book review: Justin Mitchell's "Shenzen Zen" is painfully hilarious

Shenzen Zen: An Accidental Anthropologist’s Decade of Life, Love, and Misadventure in the Middle Kingdom

Justin Mitchell

Telford Garden Press

2018

The only reason you need to purchase and read Justin Mitchell’s new memoir of his journalistic adventures in China, Shenzen Zen, is that it contains this sentence:

“I never thought that at the same time next year I’d be spending the afternoon of my 51^st with an apparently autistic 4-year-old Chinese child on a beach with signs forbidding ‘Whoring and feudalism.’”

OK, there are more reasons.

Mitchell, long-time reporter and editor for American publications wholesome and unsavory, found himself living and working in China from 2003 through 2012, moving from one journalism gig to another as one does — or rather, once did back when there was a plethora of publications to drift among. The resulting adventures could have filled a book, and did.

(Please note, I have been reading Justin for 40 years or so. I grew up reading his music writing for Denver’s late lamented Rocky Mountain News. Years later, I met him in a drug-fueled haze somehow associated with our mutual involvement with the pioneer regional TV program HomeMovies, and have tracked him ever since, through gigs at such stellar rags as the Weekly World News, where he crafted lifestyle pieces such as “Melt Flab Away with the Roadkill Diet!.”)

His chronicles are great — like the best journalistic prose, his writing is snappy, to the point, and insolent. There is not one scrap of high-minded analysis here, nor the stench of any self-righteous soul-searching. Instead, Mitchell does what one is supposed to do. He tells us his story in as straightforward, honest, and entertaining manner possible, and succeeds.

Mitchell doesn’t tread on the ground of history here (although he did dub Hong Kong’s somewhat infamous “milkshake murderer”). He stays in the zone of real life, at ground level, dealing in the daily details that define a life no matter where it’s lived. He looks for a decent place to live, tolerable food, cheap bars, and lively female companionship and even affection.

The politically correct will not tolerate this book; a few chapters in they will shriek and puff themselves inside out like a kernel of outraged popcorn. The rest of us will thoroughly enjoy it.

To be sure, Mitchell doesn’t hold back on sarcastic commentary, skewering the hypocrisies of the Chinese system, the ugliness of the Western visitor, and their mutual cultural incomprehension. Above all, he doesn’t kid himself, and we get a warts-and-all self-portrait as well. The result is an eloquent, raw, sharp-toothed take on a life, in a style that bears far more resemblance to reality than that of many memoirists.

Journalists and comics are a lot alike. Both populations consist of inveterate gossips, excuse-makers, lowlifes, guttersnipes; bitter, twisted, sociopathic, and bitterly funny humans. Neither profession sports a union, for the simple reason that there is no solidarity in them besides at the bar rail. And both know how to tell stories. Mitchell’s books is crammed with them, and most are laugh-out-loud funny (OK, he’s not a clown — he breaks down and gets serious when appropriate).

So do yourself a favor and read someone with no redeeming social value, but plenty of human value. Shenzen Zen is a good time.

The NRR Project #49: Fanny Brice sings ‘My Man’/’Second Hand Rose’

‘My Man’/’Second Hand Rose’

Performed by Fanny Brice

‘Second Hand Rose’ recorded Nov. 8, 1921

Music: James F. Hanley Lyrics: Grant Clarke

3:14

‘My Man’ recorded Nov. 15, 1921

Music: Albert Willemetz, Jacques Charles, and Maurice Yvain Lyrics: Channing Pollock

3:15

In 1921, the top comic in America was Fanny Brice. She was the uncrowned star of the biggest, most popular revue show on Broadway, the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921, featured in four scenes in the first act, three in the second. Two of her performances from this show became her heads-and-tails signature songs, one highlighting her comedic talents and the other shining a light on a personal sorrow that informed her work.

That a Jewish Hungarian immigrant girl could break into big-time show biz and become a star is the stuff of movies, and so if we know Fanny Brice at all it’s as Barbra Streisand’s interpretation of her in the 1968 film adaptation of the 1963 hit Broadway musical Funny Girl, which made Streisand a star. It’s a lot of mythic baggage to carry.

The “real” Fanny Brice, Fania Borach, had a story that was a lot more mundane. She was funny and determined and assertive. She had a big, pleasant voice paired to sharp, clear gestures. There was a long roster of female comedians at the time, few of them remembered now – Mae West, Beatrice Lillie, Ina Claire, Marie Dressler, Helen Broderick, Joan Davis, Gracie Fields, Moms Mabley, Polly Moran, Amanda Randolph. Fanny’s wholehearted exuberance and energy was welcoming, making her a perfect clown.

A large part of her early shtick was mining the familiar and popular vein of fish-out-of-water ethnic humor. Her Yiddishe takes and talk undermined the satirical targets of her comedy sketches. In “Second Hand Rose,” a novelty song with music by James F. Hanley (“Indiana,” “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”) and lyrics by comedy writer Grant Clarke (“Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” “Am I Blue?”), turns a pathetic situation into a shout of complaint. The song’s heroine, who never has anything new, is not the typical silent sufferer of other songs such as “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “I’m Nobody’s Baby.”

“Even Jake the plumber, he’s the man I adore/He had the nerve to tell me he’s been married before,” she sings, giving the song a witty sexual punchline before coming back to the refrain. In contrast, “My Man” was a calculated choice, one of the first instances in American culture in which a singer’s personal travails became part of the emotional freight of their song’s delivery.

It was already someone else’s signature song. It originated in France and was debuted by the chanteuse Mistinguett in 1916. The original lyrics make it clear that the singer is a prostitute singing about her pimp. An obvious rewrite for more parochial American tastes had to take place, so playwright and lyricist Channing Pollock came up with acceptable English lyrics – less “vulgar,” but still effective and affecting.

And Brice sang it straight. Brice was a celebrity, with a marriage that filled the headlines. Her husband Nicky Arnstein was a gambler and a con man, perpetually in legal trouble as well as, evidently, irresistible (his portrayal in the Funny Girl film by the suave Omar Sharif feeds that contention).

Full of feeling, dressed in a torn, dirty costume standing under a prop streetlamp (coming as close as America could to the implication that she was a streetwalker) she wowed the Follies opening-night crowd. People read into her interpretation the heartache the connection with Arnstein was causing. In just the same way today that fans sift through a performer’s output and project what they hear of their personal life onto the material. Brice’s emotional openness, vulnerability, and inclusiveness made the listener feel that this was her own story, not just an archetype.

Brice’s troubles undoubtedly resonated through the song, but the experience was generic enough to make it resonate with the listeners. There is another layer of interest, too – the novelty of a performer stepping outside their specialty, especially a comic artist being “serious.” Later, many supposedly lightweight performers would use a dark stage or film turn to legitimize their talent and raise their critical estimate.

Brice would turn from the stage to radio, scoring even more success as radio’s Baby Snooks, a misbehaving, truth-spouting brat who constantly subverted the adult expectations around her. She lived feisty. She said, “I lived the way I wanted to live and never did what people said I should do or advised me to do.”

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘Arkansaw Traveler/Sallie Gooden.’

Recalled to life: or, where did my last six months go?

On August 26 of 2017, I was just sitting down to appetizers with my wife at a local restaurant when I passed out. Six months and two hospital stays later I am not only recovered but have what in essence is a second opportunity to live fully. Was it a stroke? A nervous breakdown? Adrenal insufficiency? A road-to-Damascus moment? What happened?

I had just returned from a long trip, driving home alone for 1,200 miles after dropping our son off at college for his sophomore year. I was sleeping rough in the car, eating catch as catch can . . . overdoing it. I was tired, more profoundly sleep-deprived than I could imagine.

Still, it was quite a surprise to pass out for the very first time in my life, especially in a public place. Though I was only out for 30 seconds or so, my thoughtful wife summoned an ambulance immediately. I found myself being loaded onto a gurney, cannulated, and shipped off to the nearest hospital. (Here's how awesome the restaurant was -- they boxed up our dinner to go!)

I was floundering. I shook with tremors, and numbness and tingling plagued my hands and feet. I was dizzy, but not in the classic sense of the room turning about me. Instead, I felt as though I were tumbling forward, end over end, uncontrollably. I was flushed and sweating, alternating with bouts of chills. My heart raced and my breath caught in my throat. My ears rang, and my throat was swollen and painful. I couldn’t bear light or noise. I was curled in on myself like a fetus.

I was drifting in and out of consciousness, and unconsciousness would have been my first choice. Above all, I was in an absolute and helpless panic. It felt like the floor had opened beneath me and I was plunging hopelessly into a never-ending nothing. You know how you miss a step in the darkness and suddenly stumble, grasping helplessly for something to steady you? This was my state, lying stock-still and wired up to all the diagnostic machines.

After two days and no diagnosis, they sent me home. I hung on for a month, hoping the problem would cure itself. Finally, in early October, I was seized with another spell so severe that I packed myself off to a second institution. Once again, they examined me — nothing. Fortunately, my wife had made an appointment at the adjacent cardiologist’s office. He took one listen to my thuddering chest and ordered a coronary angiogram (this is when they slip a tube up your vein and take a gander at your ticker with the help of x-rays and dye).

That test proved negative — as did many others. In fact, they tested every part of me over six days, through MRIs, CT scans, bloodwork, you name it. The doctors examined everything but my taint (look it up). No abnormalities were found. They were very apologetic. (One thing I did note is that many medical specialists simply cannot think, can’t extrapolate outside the bowling-lane boundaries of their unique disciplines. This clinical modesty results in the reduction of errors — and liability — but it doesn’t go far in solving a complex problem.)

An inevitable round of visits to specialists turned up nothing. Meanwhile, I was still living a very provisional existence. I was trapped at home, still victimized by the same symptoms, unable to sit up for very long periods, much less travel, and exercise, do the chores and run the errands. I couldn’t go to shul or to school functions. Initially, I was largely unable to talk for a couple of weeks, and the ability to write a coherent sentence took about a month. I was sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day, with naps of 2 to 4 hours in between. I was vanishing.

Finally, somewhere between the endocrinologist and the neurotologist, I got help. The diagnostic prize goes to ENT-otolaryngologist Carol Foster at the University of Colorado Hospital. “It’s SLEEP APNEA,” she pronounced with confident finality.

????

It still astonishes me that such a prosaic problem should be life-threatening. However, with me the problem was far worse than imagined. I went to a sleep clinic and had a study done — the kind where they wire you up and monitor you all night. (Again, my prescient wife noticed a problem years before, and I had been tested no fewer than three times by three different clinics, with inconclusive results.) It turns out I was experiencing an AHI (Apnea-hypopnea index) of 52 — meaning I was coming out of a sleep state nearly once a minute, all night long.

Not only had this produced the symptoms outlined above, but I learned that perhaps for as long as a decade, I had been sleep-deprived like this. My neural and cardiac functions, my cognitive skills, my focus, my immune system, even my glandular output and the amount of gray matter in my head, had atrophied to the point that my life was in danger.

By this point, I was sweating through three T-shirts a night, and beginning to feel uncontrollable hallucinations creeping in at the corners of my consciousness. I hunkered down and hung on. Thanks to the efficacy of my health insurance, I waited FOUR MONTHS for the CPAP machine that saved my life.

Finally, I started healing. I craved and drank cup after cup of green tea. It felt as though within me, stark against a field of deep red, was a small system of black branches, growing outward, with painful slowness. It was my nerves regenerating, my senses widening.

Now, I know that for many sleep apnea is the flavor of the month and that hordes are clamoring for the little bedside “breathing machines” that regulate one’s airflow during sleep. However, mine is a link back to health and sanity. After five months flat on my back, vegetating, I finally felt alive again. Gradually, I could do more — drive to the store, the library, my daughter’s school. Hit the gym. Take out the trash.

I started to read again. Trapped at home, I finally finished Don Quixote, Nicholas Nickleby, Tristram Shandy, The Odyssey. I read over a book I had finished writing — and discovered that it wasn’t finished. My mental deterioration was obvious over the latter half of the manuscript’s pages. I set to making the book over again.

And to making my life over again. I could now tell that the incremental damages to my body had severely circumscribed my ability to deal with people, stress, and various professional and personal challenges. I was noted for not being able to go out at night, to attend social functions, to even pass the time of day with someone without falling into an irrevocable panic. Now I find myself capable of all these things, social again, able and eager to travel, not consumed with anxiety. I am becoming a new and different person, hopefully a better and more authentic version of myself.

This carries anxieties as well. My wife is getting used to someone who is now much more capable, centered, and present than the old curmudgeonly me. Is this a good thing? To me it seems equivalent to getting used to a spouse who’s been overseas, or in a coma, or both, for years. My alert exuberance can be quite irritating. And what about the return of a vanished libido? We are working on it.

Of course, all this illness led me, as the least thing usually does, to bouts of pretentious and self-pitying thinking. Not knowing if you are going to have a life is sobering enough. Now I thought: well, here I am now. What am I doing here? What am I good for?

The short answer is, just what I was before. These mental belches come and go. However, I did stubbornly pull a few precepts out of the experience. 

1. The body has primacy. I’ve never had a comfortable existence inside of mine, being the kind of person who lives for and within the confines of his head by and large. However, I am manifested in my body, must greet the world with it, and now I must nurse it along. It told me in no uncertain terms that I can do, say, think nothing without its consent. I am finally listening to my body. The payoff is, in taking it seriously, I now find myself at the gym every day, eating better, and losing weight. It’s a miracle to regain years of dimmed vitality, especially when I am still capable of using them.
2. I don’t have time, or rather it’s all I have. My children are almost all grown, I’ve had two or three careers, a couple of marriages. Due to age, my demographic value is now nil. Biologically speaking, I’ve done my part and am no longer needed. Whatever else is true, I have no time to waste. I get to live my life, love my loved ones, and have a few more laughs. So if you were about to ask me to get involved with something stupid, I can’t. I have to hurry.
3. I need to be here now. My recovery means that I have not only better health and function, but that I have a broader bandwidth — emotionally, and dare I say spiritually (ssh don’t tell). My senses grow sharper and more comprehensive, my boundaries widen, and it can all be a little overwhelming as I am used to being shut up in the closet of my limitations, walled off even from perceptions, new sensory input. But I hang in there. We owe the world the gift of our attention.
4. As usual, I am not in charge. My AA experiences continue to teach me humility. I keep Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning next to my religious texts and consult it often. “Everything can be taken from a man,” he writes, “but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” At my worst, the absolute nadir of despair, the deity was still there and the architecture of the cosmos hung together. I almost lost it all, and came through with a second chance at a better, fuller life. None of it is my doing. I am grateful.

For me there is just today, and the older I get the more I am at peace with that approach. One of my favorite prayers states that “We have come into being to praise, to labor, and to love.” That is precisely what I intend to do.

The NRR Project #48: William Jennings Bryan's 'Cross of Gold' speech

‘Cross of Gold’ speech

Speaker: William Jennings Bryan

Recorded: 1921

9:32

William Jennings Bryan was known as “The Great Commoner,” but it is more apt to think of him as America’s first great demagogue. He was the ultimate orator, with a booming voice, expressive body, and a mellifluous approach to speechwriting that swept listeners into a rapt state, and sometimes rapture itself. He could command a crowd, but not the electorate — he ran for president three times, and lost each time.

Fate deigned to make him an early success. At the politically young age of 36, he reached his zenith in the American consciousness on July 9, 1896 at the Democratic convention in Chicago — his celebrated “Cross of Gold” speech.

Robert Cherny’s essay on the speech is invaluable for making clear the then-burning issue of the “gold standard” versus the “free silver” factions in U.S. politics. In essence, big business and the moneyed interests, what Teddy Roosevelt was soon to term “the trusts,” preferred the low prices caused by accepting only gold as legal tender. Meanwhile, the farmers of the country, still a substantial majority, wanted the coinage of silver in order to ease the debts they could not pay due to lower prices for their goods.

“The Boy Orator of the Platte” was a champion of the people (something disputed by historians such as Irving Stone, who considered him a fatuous blowhard). Devoutly religious, he had a Messianic sense about him that was quite compelling. The Democratic Convention was made for his purposes.

The speech itself was a mishmash of invective, sentiment, and rhetoric, much of it audience-tested in prior speeches for maximum effect. “The humblest citizen in the land when clad in the armor of a righteous cause is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they can bring. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty — the cause of humanity.” He excoriated the “Atlantic coast” (aka big business) and apotheosized the common man —

“Ah. my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic Coast; but those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—those pioneers away out there, rearing their children near to nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their children and churches where they praise their Creator, and the cemeteries where sleep the ashes of their dead—are as deserving of the consideration of this party as any people in this country.

“It is for these that we speak. We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came.

“We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!”

He aligned himself with populism, that great uprising at the end of the 19^th century that pitted the farmers and the labor movement against bank, railroads, monopolies, and the bigwigs of high finance. This progressive and socially responsible outline of action would be co-opted by the major parties and become a significant thread in American political thinking.

“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

“You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

Finally, Bryan wound up with a killer finish. Gesturing dramatically, he concluded with, “. . . you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

The convention went wild, applauding and parading Bryan on their shoulders for 25 minutes. “The Silver Knight of the West” won his party’s nomination, but lost to McKinley.

Bryan was a large political figure, but never an effective leader. He was a great candidate (he invented the election strategy of canvassing the country, speechmaking incessantly as he went to rally his supporters) but he was destined to be an ever-more-marginal player. Finally, he wound up as a kind of “fundamentalist pope” (according to H.L. Mencken) who fought the teaching of science in schools, most notably in connection with the Scopes trial of 1925.

Still, he articulated the feelings of a large mass of the American public. More than that, he worked a kind of rhetorical magic. In the days before media’s rise (in fact, this recording is a 1921 recreation by Bryan of his epic speech), the compelling individual had to prove their mettle live, in public, in front of hundreds or thousands. This kind of magnetism can only be hinted at in Bryan’s recorded commemoration.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Fanny Brice sings ‘My Man/Second Hand Rose.’

Dear Fred: Reading ‘Good Things Happen Slowly’

Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life In and Out of Jazz

Fred Hersch

Crown Archetype

2017

Dear Fred:

I was going to write this to you directly, but I thought if I published it, that it might lead more people to read your new autobiography. It certainly is good!

I have loved your music, both as a player and as a composer, for a long time. (Readers, in case you didn’t know it, Fred is an award-winning, killer jazz pianist and composer. You should listen to him. He has released solo work, and played with ensembles of varying size; he has also composed a lot of fully notated music that is -- well, you could say that’s art music or whatever, the main thing is, it’s GOOD.)

You are a little older than me, and we have some things in common. For instance, we both got to New York around the same time – although you stayed and I didn’t. It was great to read that your impressions of that nasty, smelly, rough, dangerous NYC of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s align with mine – and that we both loved it. Like you, I sat on the curbs outside the clubs I couldn’t afford to get into and listened, blown away, to the music inside.

Unlike you, I am not gay, but I lost my best friend to the first wave of AIDS, along with many other good and talented friends. Reading about your life with the diagnosis for going on 30 years now helps me immensely in understanding what he went through. It was very painful to bring all those memories back up again, but in a way good too.

Like you, and like many folks that I think will like this book, I have always felt ill at ease and different, yearning for acclaim and acceptance. Me? I performed comedy for years – now I write. Your writing here is great, too – clear and concise and straightforward, but evocative. I didn’t realize until I got to a certain point in the book that David Hajdu helped you out with it. He is one of my favorite non-fiction writers, someone I read and re-read to remind myself how to communicate on the page effectively. (Don’t worry – you do not sound like him, you sound like you. The best writing mentors help their pupils sound like themselves.)

Jazz really sustains me as a writer, the idea that you just have to swing with what you’ve got. And then you write: “In jazz, it’s individuality, not adherence to a standard conception of excellence, that matters most. . . . Difference matters – in fact, it’s an asset rather than a liability. There is no describing how exhilarating this epiphany was for me, as a person who always felt different from other people. In jazz, difference is the key element that makes artistry possible.” Amen.

It’s great to read about all these aspects of your life – how you approach creative projects, your struggles with addictions (I’m right there with you, again), and just the contours of the changes wrought by time and circumstance as they cut and shape your life and work. Thanks for being brave about putting all that down on paper – it certainly inspires me to be as rigorous. Didn’t someone once say that all the good stuff is hidden inside the pain?

I was sorry to read of your recent and intense health struggles. I am just coming out of a period of being physically and mentally ailing to the point that I was in bed for three months – nothing compared to what you went through, but nothing like anything I’ve experienced before. Reading those passages was an inspiration as well, although I’d just as soon we could all skip that shit and just have the inspiration straight. Still, reading about your perseverance came at just the right time for me. Thanks for the help.

And hey, I still have a ways to go before I get through your discography, but the one I’m most grateful for isn’t even on there. In 1999, you made, in collaboration with Beth Kephart and Art Lande (Art lives near me here in Boulder) Nourishing the Caregiver, which I found providentially at the time my mother was dying from cancer., and many nights when I couldn’t sleep after a day of taking her to her chemo I’d put it on and feel better. It’s the best medicine I possess.

Anyway, that’s basically it. As a creative person, and simply as a person, your book gets me where I live and makes me feel connected, not wrong, like I’m not so different after all. I think that if the world doesn’t grant you the feeling of fitting in, and if the impetus is strong enough, you can build an entire culture out of yourself, and it ends up being a gift that others can inhabit as well. I think that is exactly what you have done and are doing. 

I hope you are feeling OK, being productive, and having fun with Scott. Thanks for everything!

Sincerely yours,

Brad Weismann

The NRR Project #46: 'Swanee,' Jolson, and the problem of blackface

‘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 19^th 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.

The NRR Project #45: 'Crazy Blues' (1920)

‘Crazy Blues’

Composer: Perry Bradford

Performed by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds

Recorded: August 10, 1920

3:26

To begin with, the blues were never really just the blues. By the time Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues” in 1920, becoming the first African-American to sing the blues on record, blues concepts and forms had already infiltrated American music. However, her recording sold more than a million copies, sparking a storm of interest and a host of followers, and codifying a genre of music.

Pioneers such as Ma Rainey, while on vaudeville tours at the turn of last century, heard early blues sung by non-professionals and started to pick up the vocabulary, pulse, and feeling of the music. However, when it came to black music, the mainstream taste of the time ran to what were termed “coon” songs – racist and derogatory comedy songs that emphasized stereotyped black behaviors, sung by “coon shouters” (oddly, these were mostly white women, in and out of “blackface” makeup).

Even African-American musical giant W.C. Handy, composer, bandleader, and “father of the blues,” infused elements of ragtime and proto-jazz into his pioneering compositions such as “Memphis Blues” in 1912. That tune was first sung on record by a Caucasian, Morton Harvey, two years later. It was a staid rendition, not “hot” nor deeply felt, delivered as a kind of novelty number. Soon, these pseudo-blues became the province of white female singers such as Nora Bayes and Marion Harris.

Pianist, singer, and composer Perry Bradford convinced Okeh Records’ A&R director Fred Hager to take a chance and record Mamie Smith. She had appeared in Bradford’s 1918 revue Made in Harlem, and she had a strong, clear contralto voice that transferred onto acetate well using the acoustic recording techniques of the day. Despite reported pushback from groups that didn’t like the idea of a black singer making records, Hager went ahead.

Revenue trumped racism. Copies of the record sold by the hundreds of thousands, not just to African-Americans customers but whites as well, rich as well as poor. Here was a genre of music, a sibling of newly-born jazz, which really connected with listeners and exploded into the big time. Soon singers such as Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Alberta Hunter were drawing audiences all across the country. Soon, despite the record industry’s attempt to ghettoize the music by classifying African-American recordings as “race records,” they were welcomed into everyone’s consciousness.

Smith’s accompanists were black, too – Ernest Elliott on clarinet, Leroy Parker on violin, Johnny Dunn on cornet, Walter “Dope” Andrews on trombone, and either Willie “The Lion” Smith or Bradford himself on piano – both men claimed the distinction in later years. “Crazy Blues” is not traditional, straight blues – Bradford artfully interpolated enough variation to make it unique. However, all the elements are there – the repeated phrases, the mournful elegance of the lyrics, and most importantly the undisguised feeling that distinguished the blues from the pallid offerings of the pop hits of the day such as “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and “Whispering.”

The raucous interplay of the instrumentalists are in keeping with the organized chaos of early jazz orchestration, none of it laid out on paper but rather made up on the spot in what were known as “head” or “hum” arrangements. The strong rhythmic sense propels the song, particularly the step-down note sequences between chord changes (that familiar “wah-wah-wah” sound). Dope Andrews’ performance on trombone is a distinctive and delightful feature, using the “tailgate” or “smear” slide technique that allowed the trombonist to flow from one note to the next with ripe abandon.

Smith sings full-out, bending the notes or sidling up to them rather than landing on them with the precision of a conventional vocalist. It’s an urgent, raw sound, one that demands attention. Even though the lyrics are despairing (“I can’t sleep at night/I can’t eat a bite”), there’s something positive and assertive in her delivery that affirms a key part of the blues – the idea that the singer is working through their emotions, purging themselves of the hopelessness that inspired the song in the first place, using the music to come out on top. No wonder people were knocked out by it.

Interestingly, the last verse of “Crazy Blues” is often altered or omitted by singers and scholars. It’s an egregious example of minority-on-minority racism. “I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop/Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop,” Smith sings.

Prejudice against Asian immigrants, and Asian-Americans, was just as rife as anti-black sentiment at the time. Anti-“Chinese” riots had been recorded since the 1870s, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was on the books. The stereotype of Chinese as pidgin-English-speaking opium addicts who constituted a “Yellow Peril” that consciously sought to destroy Western civilization was entrenched in the culture. Bradford cast his despairing singer into an imagined situation where they could end their misery by bringing on death through killing a police officer, a disturbing projection of a transgressive desire.

Later performers would change the words; on Leon Redbone’s 1977 album Double Time, he artfully slurs and mumbles the offending passage. The lyrics in question are a blemish on an otherwise transformative, landmark composition.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Al Jolson sings Swanee.