Al Jolson’s “Swanee” hits #1
GEORGE GERSHWIN COMPOSED MEGAHIT WITH COMPLICATED LEGACY
One hundred years ago today… “Swanee” hit the top of the charts, where it would stay for nine weeks. It was sung by Al Jolson, perhaps Broadway’s biggest star in 1920, and composed by 22-year-old legend-in-the-making George Gershwin, perhaps the most influential US composer of his generation.
Jolson recorded “Swanee” in January 1920, for Columbia Records, whose studios were at the time located in the Woolworth Building. The record sold two million copies, and the sheet music one million, making it the biggest hit of Jolson or Gershwin’s careers.
Library of Congress.
Gershwin and lyricist Irving Caesar wrote the song the previous year for the “Demi-Tasse Revue,” which opened in October, 1919, at the Capitol Theater. In January 1920, it became a late addition to the musical Sinbad, which Jolson was starring in at the Winter Garden Theater.
Sheet music cover, 1920. Wikicommons.
It is a problematic tune, of course, in its minstrelsy–its appropriation and stereotyping of African American culture by a team of Jewish creators.
The lyrics, courtesy of Popular Public Domain Music:
I've been away from you a long time
I never thought I'd missed you so
Somehow I feel
You love is real
Near you I long to/wanna be
The birds are singin', it is song time
The banjos strummin' soft and low
I know that you
Yearn for me too
Swanee ! You're calling me !
Chorus :
Swanee !
How I love you, how I love !
My dear ol' Swanee
I'd give the world to be
Among the folks in
D-I-X-I-E-ven no[w]My mammy's
Waiting for me
Praying for me
Down by the Swanee
The folks up north will see me no more
When I go to the Swanee Shore !
(bis Chorus)
Swanee, Swanee, I am coming back to Swanee !
Mammy, Mammy, I love the old folks at home !
Just as problematic is Columbia’s marketing of the tune, which tapped into a sinister tradition of blackface that had come to Broadway via vaudeville and 19th-Century minstrel shows.
The Evening World, 9 April, 1920, p. 9.
Jolson was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who grew up in poverty, at one point being raised in Saint Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, the Baltimore orphanage where Babe Ruth would live a few years later. He is much remembered today for a career indebted to use of African American idioms and imagery, including wearing blackface on stage and screen, most famously in The Jazz Singer (1927), his most iconic film.
Gershwin, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, grew up in tenements in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. Gershwin, like Jolson, made a career of crossing boundaries, merging classical music and jazz, contributing heavily to the US canon: “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Summertime,” and countless other revered scores and songs. Although some of his work, like the operetta Porgy and Bess, is thought problematic today, Gershwin’s reputation is less controversial than Jolson’s, perhaps because Gershwin also worked (albeit sometimes very closely) with lyricists. It is the lyricists like Caesar, Dubose Heyward, and Gershwin's bother Ira, who are considered responsible for the African American dialects that are (arguably) the most racist aspect of Gershwin’s corpus.
George Gershwin, 1920-1930. Gershwin Family. Library of Congress.
Both Jolson’s and Gershwin’s legacies are complicated, vexed by our modern sensibilities regarding race and appropriation. That said, the meeting of Jews from immigrant families and African American idioms, and of intellectuals and artists from both cultures, sparked much of the creative and intellectual explosion of the 1920s, particularly in NYC.* The confluence of genres, sources and personal backgrounds that resulted in “Swanee,” the most popular song of 1920, is representative of the cultural ferment, the boundary-crossing, with all its negative side-effects, that permeated New York City in 1920.
*See, for example, Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue, and Douglas, Terrible Honesty.