Before talking about Jolson and Cantor, I want to direct your attention to a great and wonderful site that has just posted up a bit of a review of our own humble comic. Art Patient approaches webcomics with a thirst for Discovering New Things that is infectious. Delos produces the very best sort of review - one in which he shares what he has taken away from a comic, and his own suggestions about things that that comic might start paying closer attention to in order to make itself as good as it can possibly be. This strikes me as entirely rare and rather fabulous - here is a fellow who has, by constant and applied study, picked up so much pure craft knowledge, and who DOESN'T use it to poo on others via the internet, but rather offers helpful advice to those who would have it, giving his time and expertise freely to make everybody around him a bit wiser and better off. So do drop by and have a look, and then check out the rest of the site as well!

Now, Jolson. Fun Frederick Fact: Jolson was slated to be a black hat in several of the first story arcs, but was supplanted by first Salvador Dali and then The Thoremerson. Extra points if you've actually been with us since that Dali arc first launched. In any case, let's talk about the song My Mammy. It is a great shame that it is now known mainly as That Song He Did In Blackface In The Jazz Singer. The reason that Jolson chose to perform it is actually really tragic, and is contained in the anguished spoken portion of the song. The lines go, roughly,

Mammy, I'm comin,
Oh Lord, I hope I'm not late...

Mammy, don't you know me,
I'm your little baby!

Which sounds very sort of racist and terrible until you know that this is a section that Jolson added, not describing an African American nanny to whom some southern slave-owner's son is returning, as everybody more or less assumes from the context of the blackface the song was first performed in, but rather is Jolson's telling of the death of his own mother while he was just eight years old - him rushing to her, standing next to her, and her unable to recognize him. The shock of the event sent Jolson into a state of collapse for months. To him, the song was not about a Plantation Mammy, but rather about his own mother, taken from him early, and the feeling of running and running to reach her and say something final to her and Not Making It.

This does not, of course, make blackface performance A Good Thing. It was part of a demeaning structure that tried to use popular culture to belittle and disenfranchise when the law no longer could (even though, of course, the law did, and for longer than the era of the minstrels). Jolson himself abandoned it eventually, and the recordings that he made in later life are still very much worth the hearing as a transport to another time entirely, and have nothing whatsoever to do with plantation culture or the aesthetics of cultural devaluation. Here are some:

Sonny Boy: A really beautiful song - this time focused on the death of a son, rather than of a parent.

A Quarter to Nine: A song not about death at all!

- Count Dolby von Luckner