The Sound of the New World (The Sound of the Star)

"In this, my first play," Samson Raphaelson writes in the preface to The Jazz Singer, "I have tried to crystallize the ironic truth that one of the Americas of 1925—that one which packs to overflowing our cabarets, musical revues and dance halls—is praying with a fervor as intense as that of the America which goes sedately to church and synagogue."¹ Raphaelson wants the two Americas to see themselves as one, and he pursues this outcome for audiences of his play by promoting the idea that "jazz is prayer. It is too passionate to be anything else" (9). If prayer is any activity that is "passionate," then it becomes something that all Americans do—or could do—regardless of their values and beliefs. The jazz singer is "a lost soul, dancing grotesquely on the ruins" of "cathedrals and temples," who not only rejects but also actually celebrates the destruction of the very institutions that define religious America (9). But this generational conflict disappears with Raphaelson's redescription of prayer. The two Americas are really one, because the passion they display in their apparently antagonistic ways in fact indicates their common "soul"—passion that in the case of Jewish musicians like "Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, George Gershwin, [and] Sophie Tucker" has its "roots in the synagogue" (10). "These," Raphaelson says, "are expressing in evangelical terms the nature of our chaos today" (10). He intends his play to facilitate national unity by drawing attention to the evangelical terms of jazz, thus enabling each generation to recognize itself in the other's passion.

In 1927 Warner Brothers made the play into a film, also titled The Jazz Singer. The film preserves Raphaelson's strategy for uniting the two Americas by dramatizing the idea that jazz is prayer. But a competing strategy also emerges in the figure of Al Jolson, who starred in the role of the jazz singer. Jolson had inspired Raphaelson to write the play in the first place,² and Warner Brothers emphasized this aspect of the story, advertising the film as Jolson's own story ("one of the most unique features of The Jazz Singer," according to the film's souvenir program, "is the fact that it nearly parallels the life of Al Jolson!"),³ and even presenting Jolson by name in the film itself: "Jakie Rabinowitz had become Jack Robin—the Cantor's son, a jazz singer. But fame was still an uncaptured bubble— . . . Al Jolson." In the scene that follows this intertitle, Jolson introduces "Toot, Toot, Tootsie," a song he recorded with Columbia in 1922, with the signature lines from his vaudeville act: "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet" (qtd. in Rogin, 81). The camera frames him as he sings, and his direct address produces the effect of live entertainment.⁴ Jolson seems to perform as himself, without the mask of his character. This encourages viewers to ask the sorts of questions Richard deCordova identifies as characteristic of "the mode of reception set in place with the star system."⁵ With "the emergence of the star" in 1913 and 1914, "the player's existence outside his or her work in film became the primary focus of discourse" (98), and spectatorship consequently became "hermeneutic": "In reading the film the spectator is confronted with a series of questions directed toward the discovery of the reality behind the representation. With the star system, this 'reality' . . . is reduced largely to the question of the 'true' identity of the actor as the film's source" (112).⁶

When Jolson breaks character in The Jazz Singer and sings as himself, such questions are not resolved but intensified. He performs as himself, but is this vaudeville persona the real Jolson? He seems to take off one mask—that of the character—only to reveal another mask—that of the star. He's not only performing as himself; he's also performing himself, as if that self were just another one of his characters. This self-performance produces not a reality effect but what we might call a theatricality effect: his direct...