Stairway to Paradise

Jews, Blacks, and the American Music Revolution

Ari Katorza

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9783110723205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Stairway to Paradise reveals how American Jewish entrepreneurs, musicians, and performers influenced American popular music from the late nineteenth century till the mid-1960s. From blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, blues, jazz, and Broadway musicals, ending with folk and rock 'n' roll. The book follows the writers and artists' real and imaginative relationship with African-American culture's charisma. Stairway to Paradise discusses the artistic and occasionally ideological dialogue that these artists, writers, and entrepreneurs had with African-American artists and culture. Tracing Jewish immigration to the United States and the entry of Jews into the entertainment and cultural industry, the book allocates extensive space to the charged connection between music and politics as reflected in the Jewish-Black Alliance - both in the struggle for social justice and in the music field. It reveals Jewish success in the music industry and the unique and sometimes problematic relationships that characterized this process, as their dominance in this field became a source of blame for exploiting African-American artistic and human capital. Alongside this, the book shows how black-Jewish cooperation, and its fragile alliance, played a role in the hegemonic conflicts involving American culture during the 20th century. Unintentionally, it influenced the process of decline of the influence of the WASP elite during the 1960s.

Stairway to Paradise fuses American history and musicology with cultural studies theories. This inter-disciplinary approach regarding race, class, and ethnicity offers an alternative view of more traditional notions regarding understanding American music's evolution.

Chapter 1: Jokerman – The Black Mask of Al Jolson

“Everybody loves me. Those who don’t are jealous,” wrote singer Al Jolson in an advertisement he published in the Variety newspaper in 1919, wishing him a happy New Year and a good year for America.³¹ The top figure in the American entertainment industry knew he had a big ego, but there was no one but him who deserved the title of “greatest entertainer in the world.” The rising star of the Vaudeville Hall was able to sign a contract with the Shubert brothers on Broadway and starred in the musical comedy Sinbad (1918). Hollywood was to be his next prey; it was only a matter of time. In the entertainment industry, as in sports, status or ethnic origin was not important, but what “you are able to do.” “He was not a very nice character,” said singer George Jessel about two decades after Jolson died. “But he was the best performer I’ve ever seen.”³²

Jolson was perhaps the most famous artist of his time in the blackface minstrelsy. Wherever he wore a black mask, the audience responded with intensity and excitement. Jolson was also a contradictory character: an immigrant who became an American symbol; a “white” Jew in a black game. He sang with an authentic, heartbreaking drama while playing with his audience through the black minstrel mask. He was a playboy, but he alternately pretended to be an idealist; an ego maniac who played the innocent well. They say he was a mother’s child, just as he played in the Jazz Singer. The disguise of white-Americans as black entertainers was rooted in a theatrical tradition that became institutionalized during the 1830s and was not too complicated to operate. A make-up mask and a very tightly curled wig were enough to bring about a startling transformation, which turned Asa Yoelson to Al Jolson. One needed to know how to steal and borrow slang, dance steps, and African-American mimicry. But Jolson knew more; he was a trickster, but he had a special ability to give the mask a unique depth. He did it in the minstrel show of Lew Dockstader, and he did it in the film the Jazz Singer (1927). Of course, he was not the only Jew to star in this theatrical field, but he was probably the most successful.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, while Jolson entered the field of minstrelsy, it was considered a dying art. The sexual burlesque and polite vaudeville and even the nickelodeon gradually replaced blackface minstrelsy as a popular form of American leisure entertainment. In the following decades, elements of the minstrelsy culture became a natural part of the musical comedy of Broadway’s musicals and in Hollywood. The blackface minstrelsy was not extinct but changed costumes and form. The black-and-white game was and remains the ground on which American music was built.

African rhythm, European harmony and minority politics

American music is a product of the ethnic, racial and racial history of the United States. American nationalism, class struggles, and European, Latin, and African influences were melted into a boiling pot. But the preoccupation with music was not unique to blacks and Jews. During the nineteenth century, Irish, German, and later Italian immigrants took an active part in shaping the schizophrenic American mix.

For many years, writers, scholars and musicians have insisted that American popular music was created from a “wedding” of Africa and Europe in America. Rock writers liked to describe American music as a fusion of black rhythm and white sentimentality.³³ Jazz scholars also used this dialectic by explaining that jazz was the result of three centuries of mixing European harmony, African rhythms and Euro-African melodies.³⁴

But a more sober look at minority relations in the United States reveals that the picture is more complex. The whites were never a monolithic entity, but ethnic groups with diverse traditions. The WASPs defined the new immigrants not as white Americans, but as “half-black mongrels” who had to ensure their place as part of the “white race.”³⁵ Every minority began to identify itself as “American” at a different time and under different historical circumstances. Music, then, was for a long time influenced by groups of immigrants.

Irish, Germans, Italians, and Jews played a central role in shaping American music, but through dialogue with African-American culture. Race relations were always at the center. Movement, dance, rhythms, sound, traditions of vocalization, slang and sexuality that were influenced by black culture gave American music its special style. American music, ranging from the minstrels’ songs, ragtime, jazz and blues, to contemporary rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop was based on this ethnic-racial soup.

This combination is now perceived as “natural,” but the process through which America adopted schizophrenic cultural features of its “inferior” minority still remains fascinating and raises many questions, especially since this process was so contrary to the Puritan-righteous cultural world upon which the first Americans were based. The story of Al Jolson, the black mask and blackface minstrelsy may reveal to us the nature of the first American mass culture.

Love, theft, racism and everything in between

During the 1920s and 1930s, minstrelsy began to appear in New York City and introduced white artists disguised as blacks.³⁶ These artists wore black makeup on their faces, sang songs, adopted dance steps and a black body show that contained comedic, parodic and patriotic features, which were mostly available to a white audience. Minstrelsy staged the stereotype of the slave as a source of mockery and ridicule.³⁷

One central approach to understanding this phenomenon centered on the conception of American history in the nineteenth century as a process of constructing the ideology of white supremacy.³⁸ According to this view, blackface minstrelsy was a racist ideology reflected in the conquest by the West and black slavery. This racism contained ancient and varied roots but was radicalized during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The ideology for white supremacy was established during the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1837 – 1829), which was characterized by attempts by the American bourgeoisie to build institutional cultural institutions and to shape the initial cultural canon. This era was also characterized by the intensification of capitalism and patriotism, and the development of mass media. The Jacksonian era witnessed the intensification of the myth of the conquest of the West (which expresses the supremacy of the white man over the red man) and the development of this first urban mass culture of blackface minstrelsy (which expresses the supremacy of the white man over the black man). The myths about Yankee capitalism and the American dream, the great Westerners and minstrelsy began at the same time, symbolizing the American victory over people of color.

A far-reaching version of the trend regarding the “aspiration for white supremacy” assumed that this was a historical development of the American working class, convinced that the “white freedom” of the workers depended on black slavery.³⁹ For working classes, it was argued, racism had become an economic and class benefit, and the black disguise was associated with the pre-modern carnival traditions versus the status of industrialization and the emotional resistance to it. Workers were drawn to the charisma of Afro-American culture as a device that ostensibly restored the pre-industrial era to the myth of the pre-modern village festivities but expressed their attraction by showing hostility to the object of disguise. The minstrel shows introduced the working man to his natural self and the “corrupt nature” of industrialized society. According to this view, the minstrel shows were a racist tool that illustrated the idea of “reward for being white” by appropriating the image of white patriotism and democracy as “white only.”

On the other side of the spectrum, there were scholars who saw the minstrelsy as a liberal arrowhead.⁴⁰ Blackface minstrelsy, according to this approach, allowed for a safer passage of interracial energies, which were trapped daily in unbridgeable boundaries. The parodist elements of minstrelsy used for blacks and their culture were a self-defense, when in fact they masked a genuine attraction to the charisma of black culture.

The tradition of minstrelsy, according to this view, therefore, is not racist. The attraction of the blackface minstrels to black culture was not based solely on instinct, but on “authoritarian attraction” – the need to receive recognition from “below.” Tracking the minstrels reveals that most of them were middle-class Northern Irishmen who were close to the Democratic Party. The attraction to black charisma was the beginning of a bohemian tradition of young people who did not accept Puritan ethics.

Under Freudian influence, it could be concluded that through disguise and mockery the minstrels had in fact shown their love for the seemingly black body, its voice, its movement, and its sexuality; and on the other hand they were stealing black slang, movement, music and passion that often embodied real dimensions of subversion.

Blackface minstrelsy was, according to these approaches, a rebellion against the values ​​of the bourgeois family, Puritan ethics, repressed sexuality, and middle-class values.⁴¹ It was a collage of sounds, movements and parodies of a black culture that challenged European elitism, creating a deeply rooted American culture.

Minorities and American music

The most successful singers in the years before the civil war were of Irish origin: Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, Dan Bryant, Joel Walker Sweeney, George Christy and others. The special connection between the Irish and minstrelsy has given rise to various explanations that have not yet been able to provide a complete answer to the phenomenon.

A cynical and penetrating look at this connection might have given the impression that the Irish saw the minstrelsy as an ideological tool for creating a collage and a soundtrack that accompanied the ethnic process in which they moved from a sense of shared fate with the black minority to becoming a racist spearhead. The connection between the Irish and racism, it was claimed, was woven into their American experience and the mediation of the Democratic Party (Jacksonian, anti-federalist and more racist). This gave the “black Irish” – who suffered social and class inferiority – the ‘reward for being white’ in exchange for their support for the Democratic Party.

This description of the politicization of Irish immigration is inconsistent with liberal, psychological, and class trends that have illuminated other aspects of the phenomenon. The Irish minstrels may have been close to the Democratic Party, but they were also young middle-class bohemians, longing for sexual freedom while defying the culture of parents, who mediated – under the parodic disguise – the charismatic aspects of black culture to a variety of audiences.

In any case, the minstrels parodied Celtic harmonies, Italian and English operettas alongside the Irish fiddle, into entertainment with the African banjo, rhythm, visuals and black dialect.⁴² The minstrels, without awareness or predominant intentions, defined the uniqueness of American music as distinct from that of the Old World: based on European roots but separate from it. They created this uniqueness by means of the parodic and comic dimension and the use of black content. It is also possible that the minstrels created the sense of space, while joining the occupation of the West and were an effective instrument for the promotion of nationalism.⁴³

The Irish were prominent in minstrelsy and American music during the middle of the nineteenth century, followed by German immigrants, though to the higher spheres of the entertainment industry. Backed by a magnificent Teutonic music tradition, they began to stand out in the popular and high musical culture. Conductors such as Theodore Thomas and Leopold Damrosch, with Jewish roots, and his son Walter, arranged the German Kultur for the American audience. Music critics such as Henri Krehbiel and the musicologist and significant producer Oscar Sonneck, conductor and composer John Philip Sousa and the Steinway family created an aura around the sacredness of German music. The first-generation German immigrants did not succumb easily to minstrelsy, but the story of the second generation of emigration was somewhat different. Paul Dresser and German-Jewish Julius Witmark began their career as minstrels’ artists. They continued from there to work as businesspeople at the Tin Pan Alley’s publishing houses. The Jewish-Polish minstrel and songwriter Harry Gum (Gambinski) adopted a German aristocratic title, Harry Von Tilzer, to become “a name” in American music. While mediating between the Old World and the New World, immigrant children felt the ideas and sensations that connected different groups. And the Jews, many of whom had German roots, were to set up the publishing industry in the Tin Pan Alley during the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century. It is even possible that this connection between Jews and the entertainment industry was based on their apparent German identity, no less than on their Jewishness.⁴⁴ The Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who appeared in the music scene after them penetrated this space and continued their trajectory even further. Beginning in the 1880s, Jewish immigrants began to assume the role of the Irish in American music and the minstrelsy, exploiting their connections with the German-Jewish establishment that developed in the Tin Pan Alley. Al Jolson’s whistle told the story.

You ain’t heard nothing yet!

No one knows exactly the year of Jolson’s birth. The year 1886 is the information he provided, but no records were found at the Shtetl in Sardius, Lithuania. He was born as Asa Yoelson. Like other musical Jews in America, his father Moshe was a cantor. Desperate from the oppression of the Tsar’s policies, he left the family in the Shtetl and in 1890 began looking for a rabbinical position in America. Four years later he managed to bring his family to Washington, DC. His mother, Naomi, unfortunately, died a year later. Asa, the youngest son, was particularly heart-broken by this event. He was going to be a big star, but with the eternal soul of a little boy.

Unlike the movie that made him a superstar, The Jazz Singer, the process of Jewish assimilation by Asa and his brother Hirsch was the opposite. Frustrated by the crisis of tradition in the Jewish community, his father Moshe was not afraid of integration, but rather hoped that his children would choose to assimilate in various ways. As the old world melted away, the immigrant children saw the light in show business. Asa changed his name to Al, Hirsch became Harry. The last name Yoelson was converted to Joelson and then to Jolson. The streets replaced the “cheder,” and warehouses and orphanages the family unit.

From about 1899, when he was about thirteen years old, Jolson entered the real world of entertainment. There was almost no entertainment field that Al Jolson had not experienced: he wandered among traveling circuses, burlesque, and later the vaudeville theaters. During their journey the Jolson brothers landed at the Kenny Theater in Brooklyn in a trio performance with a disabled comedian named Joe Palmer. Legend has it that Jolson discovered his comic talent by mistake, out of a need to play a comic role written for him by mistake. It was comedian James Francis Dooley who offered the black mask as a defense and release from stage fright. It changed his life. A bl...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Jokerman – The Black Mask of Al Jolson
• Chapter 2: Somewhere over the Rainbow – Jewish Immigration to America and the Struggle for Popular Culture
• Chapter 3: I Used to Be Color-Blind – Irving Berlin, the Ragtime Riot and the Jewish Network in Tin Pan Alley
• Chapter 4: Someone to Watch Over Me – Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and the Jazz Journey in the Musical Comedy
• Chapter 5: It Don’t Mean a Thing If you Ain’t Got That Swing – Duke Ellington and Irving Mills’ Fantasy
• Chapter 6: Heaven With You – Jews, The Record Industry and Rock ‘n’ Roll
• Chapter 7: Stand By Me – The Black-Jewish Political Alliance and the Decline of the WASP
• Chapter 8: That is Rock ‘n Roll! Leiber and Stoller, the White Negro and the Enlargement of America
• Chapter 9: Will You Love Me Tomorrow? Carole King, Black Lolitas and the Brill Building’s hit factories
• Chapter 10: River Deep – Mountain High: Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach and the Ghost on the Second Floor of the Bus
• Chapter 11: The Sounds of Silence – Folk, the Blues and the Spirit of Capitalism Between Grossman, Bloomfield and Zimmerman
• Chapter 12: Walk On the Wild Side – Jews, Gangsters, and Rock ‘n’ Roll
• Chapter 13: Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall – Popular Music, Hegemonic Rifts, and New American Culture
• Epilogue
• Index
• Author information