Word: jolsonized
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...20th century. The first "great" movie: the Civil War epic "The Birth of a Nation"(1915), whose blacks were cringing or lazy or venal or rapacious, and whose heroes were white men in white sheets. The first "talkie": "The Jazz Singer"(1927), with the white showman Al Jolson singing "Mammy" in blackface. The biggest hit of its era: "Gone With the Wind"(1939), which romanticizes slave-owning Southerners and for whom the only good Negroes were the ones who stayed with their owners after...
...Alexander's Ragtime Band"). He wrote the most popular song in history ("White Christmas") and the longest-lived pop anthem ("God Bless America"). A one-man synthesis of American assimilation, he helped define American pop with three other gents from all over the map: New York Jew Al Jolson, Omaha German-American Fred Astaire and Tacoma, Wash., Catholic Bing Crosby...
...coon songs," which were to be sung as if by black performers - often by whites in blackface. "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is such a song, the name of the bandleader tipping listeners of the day to his race. Berlin wrote numbers popularized in blackface by Eddie Canton ("Mandy"), Al Jolson ("To My Mammy") and Bing Crosby ("Abraham" in "Holiday Inn"). Some of Berlin's coon songs offered what now seems like subversive social commentary. Beneath its jarring title and setting, the 1915 "A Pair of Ordinary Coons" could be making an early argument for people of color (unlike whites...
...tune charted at #1, #2, #3 and #4. Bessie Smith, in 1927, and Louis Armstrong, in 1937, made the top 20 with their interpretations. In 1938 the song was #1 again, in a duet by Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell; another Crosby duet, this time with Al Jolson, hit the top-20 in 1947. Johnny Mercer charted a swing version in 1945, and Nellie Lutcher put it on the R&B charts (#13) in 1948. Add Ray Charles' brilliant big-band take in 1959, and "Alexander" had a dozen hit versions in a bit under a half century...
...Blue Skies," 1926. This slightly jazzy, plenty-perky number earned a #1 for Ben Selvin and registered five other hits in 1927; the same year it was the first song performed in the first talkie, Jolson?s "The Jazz Singer." In 1946, the year the Berlin oldies musical "Blue Skies" was released, the title tune returned to the pop charts, twice: #8 with Count Basie and #9 with Benny Goodman. Finally, Willie Nelson made the song a #1 country hit in 1978 - 52 years after it was written...