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Al Jolson
Schwartz, Jean. Rock-a-bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody.
Words by Joe Young and Sam Lewis.
As introduced by Al Jolson in Lee and J. J. Shubert's musical
production
Sinbad at the Winter Garden.
Cover illustration: Al Barbelle.
New York: Waterson, Berlin & Snyder co., 1918.
Al Jolson, working in the dying racist tradition of blackface
minstrelsy,
brought a boundless energy to his performances,
often sending the rest of
the cast home while he performed
solo for his audience. Sinbad also included
two other classic
Joslon songs: Irving Caesar and Walter Donaldson's My
Mammy,
and George Gershwin and Irving Caesar's Swanee.
Swanee was Gershwin's first
big hit. Jolson starred in a number
of other improbably plotted musicals,
and will forever be
remembered for his performance in the first full talking
motion
picture, 1927's The Jazz Singer. |
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Princess Theatre Shows
In the late teens, a series of intimate musicals appeared
at the Princess Theatre, with music by Jerome Kern and libretti
by the British team of Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse. Nobody
Home of 1915 was succeeded by Very Good Eddie and by Leave
it to Jane and Oh Boy in 1917 and Oh Lady! Lady! in 1918. These
shows, with their modern settings and focus on the romantic
entanglements of a small number of recognizably American characters,
influenced the Broadway musical of the 1920s. Notable songs
from these productions include Till the Clouds Roll By and
Cleopatterer.
Kern, Jerome. Babes in the Wood. Words by Jerome Kern and Schuyler
Greene.
Cover illustration by Malcolm Strauss.
New York: T. B. Harms, 1915.
Sheet Music Collection
Kern, Jerome. Very Good Eddie. Vocal Score.
Kern's own copy, gift of Lyman C. Bloomingdale, class of 1935.
New York: T. B. Harms & Francis, Day & Hunter, 1916.
Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays |
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War I
Berlin, Irving. Oh How I Hate to Get up in the Morning.
New York: Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co., 1918.
Introduced by Eddie Cantor in the Ziegfeld Follies.
"Dedicated to my friend Private Howard Friend who
occupies
the cot next to mine and feels as I do about the bugler."
Sheet Music Collection
In 1918, Irving Berlin wrote the score for a soldier review called
Yip Yip Yaphank, in which he performed his song Oh How I Hate
to Get up in the Morning, which became one of the most popular
songs of World War I. |
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