In Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama: A Memoir (I use Amazon affiliate links so please click through and buy something and I’ll get a few pennies), Bob Odenkirk the comic actor perfectly expressed my youthful impression of Al Jolson:

Bob doesn’t even mention the use of blackface — an element he completely left out of his mockery of megaphone crooners also — but that was the part that really appalled yet fascinated me about Jolson.

I’m not passing judgement on Odenkirk for side-stepping the issue, it was the wise entertainment industry decision to make.

But there’s a reason I could never get an Al Jolson episode together for the Let It Roll podcast, many reasons actually, but it boils down to blackface.

The man is now the historical face of America’s most racist mass entertainment tradition.

Al Jolson is widely hated. His music is ignored. His movies go unwatched.

But let’s get back to Odenkirk.

Here’s Odenkirk talking about it in a video, followed by some footage from the very Jolson documentary he’s discussing.

Here’s the sketch in question from Mr. Show with Odenkirk and David Cross (* re the megaphone see note at the end of the post):

But the more I researched American musical history, the more convinced I became that Jolson had to be a big part of the story.

Here’s how he was regarded at the time of his death in 1950 in the ironically titled “The Immortal Jolson” documentary made shortly after his passing:

Al Jolson was the greatest Minstrel of them all. His style and personality left an indelible mark on Show Business. Today's greatest stars proudly claim there is a little bit of Jolson in all of them. Even after 30 or 40 years audiences who saw him perform still remember the magic that was Al Jolson.

I’ve read a fair bit about entertainers in the 1910s, 1920s, 30s and 40s and any of them that discuss or describe Jolson lavish him with praise and acknowledge his unquestioned status as the greatest theatrical performer of their era.

This is how the documentary opens:

Al Jolson’s song thrilled a nation and gave a voice to Hollywood and the stars. Beneath this towering monument (shot of Jolson’s tomb) rests a man and a legend, Al Jolson.

For nearly half a century he made America sing and laughed and cry. Though he played on our emotions with unabashed sentimentality he felt within himself an emptiness that no personal relationship could fill. Insecure, plagued by self-doubt Jolson felt important and alive only when he heard the cheers of an adoring crowd and the love music of applause but he was the greatest entertainer that the world has ever known.

*I can’t resist being pedantic and pointing out that Jolson preceded the crooners by a full generation and would never have needed a megaphone to be heard in a theater. The crooners were so called because they were masters of singing quietly into microphones to deliver broadcast or recording that gave listners the shocking feeling that a strange man was whispering in their ear. Very intimate.

The most beloved American entertainer of the second and third decades of the 20th Century, becomes a laughing stock only 45 years after his death.

What beloved titan of our current era will suffer that fate?

Thanks for your patience with me.

I haven’t been able to work on the Let It Roll project as much as I had hoped, but good news: we’re going to re-start the show on Pantheon Podcasts in September with two new shows a month.

We are also going to be able to offer subscriptions via Pantheon so for now I’m putting the plan to migrate the content to Substack on hold.

I am still planning to write more on this Substack and all subscription money goes to support the show so please don’t unsubscribe unless you need or want to.

I’ve been battling a lot of writer’s block among other issues so just typing these words is a bit of a triumph.

Thanks for subscribing and I promise to be a better correspondent.

Best,

Nate

We’re working on getting the shows re-edited so we can move the full versions behind our Substack paywall and replace the iTunes/Spotify etc versions with 35 minute previews.

With 400+ episodes it’s quite a daunting bit of work. But progress is being made.

With that out of the way I thought I’d share some of the music stuff I’ve been reading and listening to lately.

Paul Williams, too pop for me as a kid

I love Ace Records and their songwriter series. We’ve all been programmed to think of music as the work of performers, but IMO pop is as much a product of the songwriters as anyone else.

Understanding that, Ace’s Songwriter series has compiled excellent collections of the work of such legends as Pomus & Shuman, Lieber & Stoller, Goffin & King, etc etc many of which I have in my collection.

But I’m especially intrigued when they collect the works of songwriters I’ve dismissed or ignored and Paul Williams certainly fits that bill.

He’s someone I first became aware of in the 1970s when he was as likely to be a guest star on The Love Boat or Fantasy Island as he was to pop up on the Merv Griffin Show behind a piano.

As a hard rocking white boy, I dismissed his work for The Carpenters and other pop artists out of hand.

As I’ve matured and been able to admit that songs like “Rainy Days and Mondays” and “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie are more than guilty pleasures, they’re well crafted pop classics.

So I’ve placed my order for the new Ace Records comp.

We've Only Just Begun - The Paul Williams Songbook
Ace Records (Songwriter Series)

I’ve linked directly to Ace Records rather than Amazon because they’re great and I think you should support them.

The Four King Cousins

The Paul Williams research led me down a fascinating rabbit hole about one of the artists featured whom I’d never heard of before: The Four King Cousins.

Turns out the Cousins were a spin off from a more established act, The King Sisters who in turn were kind of the Mormon version of the great Boswell Sisters in the 1940s.

Well, more like the Kings were acolytes of the Boswell Sisters, who were the first white girl singers to really swing. The Boswells famously worked with Bing Crosby and inspired the whole wave of 1940s swinging sister acts led by the Andrews Sisters.

The Fall of the Black Keys

I’ve also been paying attention to the collapse of The Black Keys summer arena tour. Stephen Thomas Erlewine covers it well.

So It Goes

The Black Keys: Rock's Lonely Boys

Unlike much of America, I actually had the opportunity to see the Black Keys perform live in 2024. My chance arrived in the middle of a South By Southwest where the Black Keys and their associates were omnipresent. The duo of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney unveiled a feature-length documentary called…

Read more

2 years ago · 21 likes · Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Prince’s birthday

Prince’s birthday got some good coverage. Here’s Nelson George’s take.

The Nelson George Mixtape

TODAY IS PRINCE'S BIRTHDAY

Prince Rogers Nelson was born on June 7, 1958 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A transcend star with immense musical gifts, an eccentric vision, and charisma, his impact on pop culture endures. In July his greatest pop culture moment, the film and album ‘Purple Rain,’ will be forty years old. This is a throwback column to interactions with him when I was a mu…

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2 years ago · 26 likes · Nelson George

Of all the musical forces that defined the ‘80s I had the most unusual interactions with Prince Rogers Nelson, that bold singer-songwriter-producer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He would be in and out my life quite a bit in “the Me decade,” I’d have no interaction with him for years after, and then he’d become my unlikely benefactor in the 21st century.

And Nick Hornby’s:

A Fan's Notes, by Nick Hornby

Belated birthday wishes

It was Prince’s birthday yesterday. As you may or may not know, my most recent book was about Dickens and Prince, two gifted and wildly productive superstars; they were both criticised for being over…

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2 years ago · 98 likes · 20 comments · Nick Hornby

"It was Prince’s birthday yesterday. As you may or may not know, my most recent book was about Dickens and Prince, two gifted and wildly productive superstars; they were both criticised for being over-productive. A critic famously took Dickens to task for writing “too often and too fast…he has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick” - and that was after his first book. (Mate, you ain’t seen nothing yet.) Brutally hard work and no sleep killed both of them. Dickens died from a stroke, and Prince died from an overdose of opioids, needed because of the chronic pain he endured from all those hyper-kinetic shows. (On tour, he frequently used to play two a night, one in a stadium, and then afterwards a secret gig in a club, sometimes until five or six in the morning.) Selfishly, I’m glad they churned it out. I still haven’t read everything Dickens wrote, and it would be impossible to get through everything Prince recorded: some estimate that there are eight thousand unreleased songs in his vault. New albums are still being released every year.

Reconciling with The ‘Mats

I’ve also returned gingerly to reading music books. There for a bit I’ve over done it and combined with the stress of my main business failing I had to take a break.

I’ve been grabbing tomes I had lying around that were about bands I was already familiar with. Including Trouble Boys, Bob Mehr’s excellent biography of The Replacements.

(Note that clicking that link and buying the book will kick back a commission to me.)

This was a bit of healing for me as I’ve gone from being a huge fan of their early work in the 1980s to a passionate hater of Paul Westerberg, Tommy Stinson and everything they put out after signing with Sire Records.

Having initially been in the complete thrall of Dave Marsh and The Rolling Stone Record Guide (1982 edition), I reacted hard in the other direction and developed a reflexive hatred of critical darlings like Bruce Springsteen, Big Star and the Replacements.

Learning from Michael Azzerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life that the ‘Mats were the absolute opposite of the DIY punk ethos made me like them even less.

Reading allegations that Westerberg had been extremel callous about the death of Bob Stinston — had in face insisted that a freshly clean and sober Stinson drink before getting back on stage with the band — made me positively loath the guy.

So reading Mehr’s balanced bio helped me get over that to a certain extent.

I still think everything they recorded on Sire was weak and lame but I have reconnected with the early work and enjoy it as much as ever.

This James Baldwin quote kind of sums up my feelings about Paul and Tommy.

Thanks for reading and thanks more to those who are financially supporting the show.

One of my goals of this Substack is to make it worth subscribing to as a newsletter as well as the place to find every episode of the Let It Roll podcast and keep up with any future musical history projects I undertake.

With that goal in mind, here’s a short essay I wrote about Bing Crosby while I was preparing to interview Crosby biographer Gary Giddins a couple years back.

For 30 years Bing Crosby was the most popular and beloved musician in America. He was the musical everyman for the Prohibition, Depression and World War 2 and immediate post-War eras.

For five years, during World War 2, Crosby was a moral leader in the United States. Performing tirelessly for the troops, starring in the most popular movies of the time and above all living in the ears of up to 55 million Americans a week on the radio, Crosby used his popularity and his power over his audience to boost American morale and to steer the country’s morality.

He was avowedly anti-racist. He got Louis Armstrong the first ever equal billing given a Black performer in Hollywood. He featured Black performers regularly on his radio shows and not in demeaning ways but as his musical peers and equals. When Paul Robeson guested on his show, Bing deliberately defied racists by insisting that Robeson address him by his first name and vice versa.

He tirelessly worked to entertain the troops. He traveled from Hollywood east to nearly the front lines of the European front and performed for troops and civilians doing vital work at every opportunity along the way. After the war soldiers voted him the #1 morale booster of the war.

For the last twenty years of his life, he remained a very popular performer on television but the hits dried up and the movie roles weren’t offered. He was beloved by all who remembered the war era and before.

Unfortunately the younger generations who saw him on TV rejected him along with all other pre-rock & roll performers.

And after his death his son Gary came forward with a lurid tell-all that essentially ruined Crosby’s image with the Boomers and all ensuing generations.

Despite being a popular musician of the first rank, Crosby’s celebrity so outran his music that he is seen more as a fallen idol than a musical titan.

Absolutely the key innovator of vocal microphone technique, Crosby taught everyone how to sing for electrical recordings. He was also one of the creators of the jazz-influenced vocal style that we still regard as modern. He and Louis Armstrong were each other’s favorite musician. 

But no one cares much today.

The musical magic that carried Crosby to stardom and deep into the hearts of millions for decades has waned with time and most of the blessings he shared are lost to us. The music sounds quaint. The persona of unassuming Everyman who calmly handles every situation with ease only works if he’s first known as a masterful singer who always makes it look easy.

We have the bottle on the shelf but the intoxicating, invigorating spirit has evaporated. We can watch Crosby, hear Crosby but we can’t share a great love for his music with tens of millions of others the way two generations of Americans did. Nor can we benefit from his humility and morality which gave millions guidance through some very dark days.