Jolson and Friends Blog wishes everyone a happy Chinese Lunar New Year (4705). This is the Year of the Boar.

 

Original photograph by Brian Marcus Decker, Copyright © 2007

“Chinatown, my Chinatown where the lights are low, hearts that know no other land, drifting to and fro. Dreamy, dreamy Chinatown, almond eyes of brown, hearts seems light and life seems bright, in dreamy Chinatown” - William Jerome

 

Yowza, Yowsa, yowza. This is Brian Marcus Decker, for the Jolson and Friends Blog located on the web at www.JolsonBlog.com, the first tech-nostalgia blog dedicated to the musical influences of Al Jolson and friends.  Ladies and gentleman, we continue with Part IV of our seven-part series on Vaudeville starring Trav S.D., an author, journalist, playwright, director and performance artist.  He has recently published a fascinating and entertaining book entitled “No Applause, Just Throw Money” which provides a provocative look at the history and impact of Vaudeville on American culture. 

 

The book also addresses a triage of topics including the performers, the Vaudeville circuit theaters as well as their owners.  Highlighted in this book are the musical, comedic, and magical talents of, of course, our one and only Al Jolson, as well as Eddie Cantor, Bert Williams, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Harry Houdini, Jack Benny, George Burns, Gracie Ellen, Jimmy Durante, Judy Garland, The Marx Brothers, Mae West, W.C. Fields, Bob Hope, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Milton Berle, Norah Bays, George M. Cohan, Weber and Fields and many, many more. 

 

Free Vaudeville Part IV Interview Podcast

After collecting audio assets for five Jolson related interviews, in the last few months I have launched the First Jolson Podcast and you can listen to my 7-part interview on Vaudeville with author Trav S.D. 

 

To listen to the free Jolson and Friends Blog Podcast published audio files

Use http://feed.jolsonblog.com and click on:

 

Jolson and Friends Blog Podcast: Vaudeville Interview Part IV

 

To subscribe to the free Jolson and Friends Blog Podcast published audio files

 

Use http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ or http://www.podcastalley.com or http://bloglines.com/ to set-up account and then search on Jolson and Friends Blog Podcast.

 

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International Al Jolson Society 2007 Jolson Festival in Toronto: May 25th

This exciting annual Jolson event is taking place on Friday, May 25, 2007 through Sunday, May 27, 2007 in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.  Special entertainment will include Tony Babino (The heart of Jolson), Richard Halpern (Mr. Tin Pan Alley) and William Campbell (Scotland's Own Jolson).

 

For more information on this great event, go to www.Jolson.org and click on the Click for information on May, 2007, Jolson Festival near Toronto, Canada link.

 

The Dance: the History of American Minstrelsy

Playwright Jason Christophe White was presented with an award by the N.A.A.C.P. for a local west coast production of his play, “The Dance: the History of American Minstrelsy”. The show is a two-person satire on the history of American minstrel show from the perspective of African American performers wearing traditional minstrel make-up. The play is in New York City through March 3^rd at the Richmond Shepard Theater located at 309 East 26^th Street.

Jolson and Friends Blog Special Feature: Jolson Video Play List

 

The Jolson and Friends Blog, is starting a new series featuring no other than Al Jolson video links on www.youtube.com.

 

Click on the link below to view Al Jolson singing "Halleluja I’m a bum"”.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=YgEsbGzugiY

 

 

 

 

 

Janet Cantor Gari

Janet Cantor Gari, youngest daughter of Eddie Cantor, is still recovering from multiple injuries from a recent mugging in New York City. Janet is still in rehabilitation.

 

Please keep sending those cards and emails to Garisongs@aol.com or a letter or card to:

 

Janet Cantor Gari

c/o Brian Gari

650 West End Avenue>

New York, NY 10025>

 

 

NEW SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Video tape to DVD transfer services

 

My overall mission for this blog is to preserve and archive an important part of our cultural history as it relates to Jolson, as well as related music and the performing arts.  Too often, many of these historical treasures, including people, films, recordings, artwork and theatres have disappeared and have been long forgotten.

 

In our personal lives, many of us have kept copies of videotapes of important friends and family events including vacations, birthdays, weddings and holiday celebrations. After 10 years of lying on the shelf in a closet, you may find out that some of your video tapes are no longer playable and these precious moments are lost forever.

 

As a special service to the Jolson and Friends community, Affinitee LLC is offering an affordable way to preserve these priceless memories digitally for generations by transferring your VHS tapes to DVDs.

 

VHS (unedited) videotape transfers to DVD is $14.99 plus shipping. Additional DVD copies of the same VHS tape are $9.99.

 

• Return shipping costs for up to three original videotapes and DVD copies is $9.95 via FedEx Ground or UPS with no signature required.
• These DVD-videos are 100% compliant to the DVD standards and will play on DVD players that read DVD-R media. Almost all DVD players made in the past 3 years play DVD-R media.
• Your tape transfer to DVD will include chapter markers every 10 minutes. Just use the fast forward function on your DVD remote to jump forward or backwards.
• These prices are based on up to two-hours of continuous tape conversions without any editing for VHS format tapes only.
• This service can not duplicate materials that are copy protected including commercial films.

 

To place a videotape transfer to DVD order or request additional information, payments through Pay Pal, please contact: brian@affinitee.com .

 

 

Save on limited edition T-shirts up (Includes FREE Shipping)

 

You will be “Sitting on Top of the World” with these limited edition T-shirts.  These are perfect holiday gifts for collectors of nostalgia and a must have for anyone interested in the legendary Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Each t-shirt comes with a FREE matching gift card.

 

AffiniTee LLC only uses brand new Hanes Beefy-Ts premium 6.1 oz. heavyweight pre-shrunk 100% cotton.  These unique vintage images are applied using a high pressure industrial heat press and professional grade hot transfers and a proprietary process for extended wear.

 

This unique T-shirts is available in white or black in adult sizes including small (34-36), medium (38-40), adult large (42-44) and XL (46-48) sizes. Additional sizes including children, adult XXL and XXXL are available on a special order basis and are subject to a $3.00 surcharge to prices listed below

 

 

 

 

          Jolson Singing Fool                     Cantor Tell to the Judge                    Moon Rocket Ride

 

     Jolie                                          Old Time Baseball                           Asbury Clowns

                          Sherlock Double                         Sherlock Improbable                           Sudoku Puzzle

 

 

 

 

Here’s the Deal:

 

Al Jolson Limited Edition T-shirt: The Singing Fool

This is a vintage color reproduction of a 1928 theatrical program.

 

Eddie Cantor Limited Edition T-shirt: Tell it to the Judge

This is a vintage two-color reproduction of 1930s board game.

 

Moon Rocket Ride Limited Edition Carnival T-shirt

This is a vintage color reproduction of a hand painted tin carnival sign.

 

Jolie NEW Black & White Limited Edition T-shirt:

This is a vintage B/W illustration of Jolie from the 1920s.

 

NEW Color Old Time Baseball Limited Edition T-shirt:

Forget the Dodgers; this is real deal, a turn of the century Brooklyn Baseball T-shirt.

 

NEW Asbury Park Clowns Limited Edition Boardwalk T-shirt

This clown no longer graces Asbury Park Boardwalk, but this vintage color reproduction lives on.

 

NEW Sherlock Double Limited Edition T-shirt

Looking left and right “the game is afoot” with this vintage, black and white illustrated, Sherlock t-shirt, with no clues overlooked. 

 

NEW Sherlock Improbable Limited Edition T-shirt

Vintage Sherlock, black and white illustrated profile, on t-shirt with famous quote, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

 

NEW Sudoku Clueless Limited Edition T-shirt

Sudoku aficionados can proudly challenge the world with this puzzling T-shirt.

 

 

 

Here’s the Deal: Save up to 10%

 

White or Natural T-Shirt: $18.00 with FREE U.S Shipping and Matching Gift Card (Regular price $20.00)

 

Black T-Shirt: $20.00 with FREE U.S Shipping and Matching Gift Card (Regular price $22.00)

 

Pack of 5 gift cards: with envelopes is $9.00 with FREE U.S Shipping (Regular price $10.00)

 

Pack of 10 gift cards: with envelopes is $16.00 with FREE U.S Shipping (Regular price $18.00)

 

 

For additional information, special orders, discounted shipping outside the ostalCode w:st="on">U.S.ostalCode>, payments through Pay Pal, please contact: brian@affinitee.com .

 

To order please specify style (Jolson, Cantor, Moon, Jolie, Brooklyn Baseball, Asbury Park Clown, Sherlock Double Profile, Sherlock Improbable, Sudoku), quantity, size, t-shirt color (white/natural or black), type (t-shirts or matching gift cards) and your shipping address. Please send checks to:

 

AffiniTee LLC c/o

Brian Marcus Decker

24 Arverne Road>

West Orange, NJ>

07052>

 

 

Part IV: Vaudeville Interview with Trav S.D.

 

Brian Marcus Decker:  One of the hardest topics that you address in the book is the cultural legacy and historic importance of black face.  You really try to provide a very balanced perspective on this topic.  You refer to this art form as “problematic at best”.  Its racial depiction you address as uniformly “heinous in its cruel and unfair representation of a group of Americans who were powerless to protest.”  However you also indicate that these Minstrel songs, the monologues, the sketches, laid the foundation for the character of American show business for all time, and all American popular music including jazz, blues, country, as well as improv and sketch comedy.  While not actively promoting the contemporary use of burnt cork by performers, how do we as a culture embrace these roots of this art form and still remain politically correct?

 

Trav S.D.:  I think the sad answer is that we wait a long time.  Unfortunately, as the recent Michael Richard episode demonstrates, both racism and the passions it unleashes are by no means dead issues.  In 50 or 100 years when we’re in some kind of multi-racial Star Trek like utopia, and the grievances of the past are just that, the past, there can follow some kind of a reasoned dispassionate assessment.  How we treat the topic now is difficult.  I try to paint a balanced picture because I feel the issue is a lot more complex than it’s sometimes made out to be. 

The one thing ironically black face was the root that the earliest African-American entertainers took to get on stage, like Bert Williams and “Pigmeat” Markham thrived on it and they paved the way for everyone who came after them.  And secondly, in addition, black face wasn’t the only heinous misrepresentation.  Vaudeville comedians were equal opportunity offenders.  You know if you look at the depictions of the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Germans, American-Indians, on and on, some of these were just at outrageous, just as demoralizing as black face and that’s not to diminish the crime of black face, it’s just to put it in a broader context of general insensitivity.

“Everyone kind of acts like Jolson invented black face, but the irony is that he represents the last generation of black face entertainers.  And the other irony is that everybody did some performing in burnt cork until the 20s or 30s... then it’s kind of unfair to single out Jolson.”

Brian Marcus Decker:  Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, Emmett Miller, and even Mae West, performed their careers in black face (we should also add Bing Crosby and Shirley Temple to the list).  Why do you think, or not, as a performer Jolson perhaps more than any other, seemed to carry the majority of the negative stigma associated with Minstrels and black face today?

 

Trav S.D.:  I think Jolson’s an unfortunate victim of Gestalt psychology.  Most people can’t be bothered to know everything about this archaic historical topic and you can’t blame them. So in 120 or so years of the practice gets pinned on one guy because everybody knows who he is and because he was in The Jazz Singer and The Jolson Story.  Everyone kind of acts like Jolson invented black face, but the irony is that he represents the last generation of black face entertainers.  And the other irony is that everybody, like you said, everybody did some performing in burnt cork until the 20s or 30s.  I must have read about 100 showbiz biographies and all of them did it at some time or another like, even Bob Hope, Judy (Gumm Sister) Garland, Groucho Marx, they didn’t make a career out of it necessarily, but they all did it at one point or another and if everybody did it then it’s kind of unfair to single out Jolson.

“Bert Williams was universally heralded as a great genius, a clown, a mime, a monologist, sketch comedian, and singer of funny and melancholy songs but a genius in all of those. Eva Tanguay was the opposite.”

Brian Marcus Decker:  Bert Williams and Eva Tanguay are among the highest paid performers in vaudeville.  While no-one ever questioned the extraordinary talents of Bert Williams, Eva, the girl who made vaudeville famous, was historically referred to as “talent less and homely”.  What was it about these performers that resonated so well among these audiences?

Trav S.D.:  It’s a really interesting paring.  Coincidentally they were both of Mae West’s favorite performers as a child.  It’s also interesting because Bert Williams and Eva Tanguay are sort of opposites.  Bert Williams was universally heralded as a great genius, a clown, a mime, a monologist, sketch comedian, and singer of funny and melancholy songs but a genius in all of those.  As a man he was kind of reserved and dignified until he put on black face, even though he was an African-American and it freed him up to be funny. 

Eva Tanguay was the opposite.  Her one bona fide genius was showmanship.  She was an extrovert and she sang and said outrageous things on stage in order to get attention.  If her actual singing and dancing were a little shaky the whole performer added up to more than the sum of her parts, which is really part of the magic of vaudeville, that theatrical illusion, star quality.

 

Brian Marcus Decker:  I read at a recent interview that the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz fuelled your ongoing interest in your younger days as well as your passions for vaudeville.  What’s the significance to you of this classic film?

 

Trav S.D.:  Nearly everybody in the movie is a vaudeville veteran; it’s amazing.  Every single cast member except for a couple and some of the screenwriters, Harold Arlen … and they all brought something different from vaudeville to the movie especially appealing to me is the comic by-play between Ray Bolger and Jack Haley and Bert Lahr, you know there were like half a dozen screenwriters on the project but those three performers enhanced the script with countless little one-liner jokes and takes and bits from their own vaudeville experience because they were comedy veterans. 

Bolger was very famous in vaudeville as an eccentric dancer and so all of that crazy dancing he does as the scarecrow he did that kind of thing all the time.  And Judy (Gumm Sister) Garland was a child vaudeville performer and that kind of very emotionally intense singing style you associate with her comes from vaudeville, and not to mention the midgets.  Most of the midgets who portrayed the munchkins or a good part of them, and they were a vaudeville act, performing midgets, where you could find them but vaudeville.  It’s a kind of a truism nowadays you can’t make a film like that again and one reason I think we can’t is because we don’t have that kind of a talent pool any more.  I’d like to see it happen, but I don’t see it on the horizon.

Brian Marcus Decker:  It’s interesting that there is one member of the original cast that you did not mention who was Buddy Ebsen (also a vaudeville veteran) who was originally cast as the Tin Man, but as they were experimenting with some of the early metallic makeup he had gotten quite, quite sick and needed to be replaced.

 

 

This is Brian Marcus Decker and thank you for joining us on the Jolson and Friends blog.  This is the first and most important blog dedicated to the life and musical influences of the legendary Al Jolson, The World’s Greatest Entertainer, as well as his friends.  And please visit us again at http://www.jolsonblog.com. 

 

March 17, 2007: Vaudeville Interview Part V

• Can you tell us about the holiday ad that Al Jolson had placed in Variety?
• You talk about the cultural shift to New York City as the world entertainment’s capital from London and Paris.  Does that directly correlate with the influence of immigration into New York and the rest of the United States during the beginning of the twentieth century?
•   Why is the Jewish immigration at the start of the twentieth century so important to the history of vaudeville and even burlesque?
• Who were some of the other important Jewish entertainers to come out of this fabled era of entertainment and why were they so successful in transitioning to other musical and comedic performance arts in terms of recording, radio, silent, talking pictures, television, and of course the book musical?

 

 

Jolson and Friends Blog Required Reading List

No Applause--Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous

Click here to shop and buy this book from Amazon

 

 My Fifteen Minutes: An Autobiography of a Child Star of the Golden Era of Hollywood (Paperback) by Sybil Jason.

 

Click here to shop and buy this book from Amazon

 

When Jolson Was King: (Paperback) by Richard Grudens.  Richard Grudens has written an entertaining and informative (must read) book for anyone interested in the legendary, Al Jolson "The World's Greatest Entertainer".

“The book contains many facets of Jolson' career including those around him, his competition, employers, and comments from those he inspired enough to form their own careers, the issue of minstrel, blackface performers, fabled stories of the famed Friar's Club, a chapter of the infamous Shubert Brothers, and chapters covering Jolson's experiences in film, radio and his extensive USO travels. Covered too are vignettes of the theatres in which Jolson performed, and of those great theatrical competitors like the Barrymore's and where they were voicing their talents while Jolson was pulling them in at the Winter Garden, and a full feature on Jolson's films from the first talkie, The Jazz Singer to his famed bio-pics The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again.” – Richard Grudens

Click here to shop and buy this book from Amazon

 

Changes to Jolson and Friends Blog

 

In the upcoming months I am looking to continue to evolve the Jolson and Friends Blog and wanted preview some upcoming changes.  As of this post, I am promoting the sale of Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and fifteen new Limited Edition T-shirt designs (featured above) and matching gift cards (with free shipping). The sales from these items will help offset the cost of maintaining this blog.

 

Due to the time intensive nature of ongoing research, content development, production and maintaining and the Blog, I will am publishing twice a month instead of weekly. The next blog update will happen on March  17, 2007.

 

 

I am starting to work on several future Jolson and Friends projects including:

·         Video tapes to DVD transfer service.

·         Jolson and Friends Recommended Reading and Viewer Lists including cost-saving shopping links to find out-of-print books, videos and more.

·         Expanded global coverage of local events.

·         Future podcasts of upcoming interviews and special performance-based content.

 

To ensure that you are automatically informed about new postings, please enter your email address at the sidebar on the left of this blog page or send an email to my attention, with the subject line “Subscribe”, to: brian@JolsonBlog.com.

 

 

 

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