Year: 1961
Time: 29:33
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Size: 68,4 MB
Art: Front
(2:06) 1. Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye
(3:41) 2. Sonny Boy
(1:45) 3. California Here I Come
(2:46) 4. Keep Smiling at Trouble (Trouble’s a Bubble)
(3:23) 5. You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)
(2:38) 6. My Yiddishe Momme
(2:02) 7. Swanee
(2:56) 8. April Showers
(3:09) 9. Anniversary Song
(2:49) 10. Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody.mp3
(2:35) 11. For Me and My Girl
(2:25) 12. In Our House
I suppose that my knowledge of the history of American pop culture still leaves a lot to be desired, because it was not until my second listen to Jackie Wilson’s You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, accompanied with a look at Jackie’s own liner notes on the back cover, that I realized the entire LP was a concentrated, half-hour-long tribute to Al Jolson, Jackie’s personal childhood idol and a dear friend to such a great number of other artists, both black and white. The problem is that, while I do enjoy digging into the vaults of American popular music from the pre-war era, it is mostly on behalf of jazz or blues artists, with an occasional bit of folk, country, or, at most, the Andrews Sisters thrown in; people who, like Al Jolson, were more about vaudeville and show business in general the Neil Diamonds and Tom Joneses of their era interest me far less, and inspire me even lesser. (That’s right, I did not even immediately catch on to the title of the LP, which should immediately bring on associations with The Jazz Singer though I do wonder about exactly what percentage of modern young Americans would bring out that particular association faster than I did).
In a way, though, this album was an inevitability. Tribute LPs to legendary artists from the previous decades were becoming a standard thing in the early Sixties, partially due to the first generations of recorded legends beginning to pass away and partially due to the record industry’s yearning for the «good old clean days»: nothing could wipe off the scum of rock’n’roll better than a reappraisal of the comparatively innocent values of grandpa and grandma music. From LaVern Baker to Sam Cooke, everybody on the R&B circuit was doing these and for Jackie Wilson, Al Jolson probably seemed like the perfect choice: The King Of Black Entertainment paying homage to The King Of Blackface Entertainment. The only problem was that for both artists, «entertainment» meant the visual aspect almost as much as the aural; to complete the comparison, people should not only hear both artists, but see them as well, and you didn’t really get to do that in 1961.
My own problem with Al Jolson, of course, lies not in the blackface department (it is almost undignified to hold lengthy ethical debates on whether we should condemn hundred year old practices), but rather in the fact that Al Jolson arrived on the American pop scene too early to make his presence properly redeemable. The love people had for the guy was the same kind of love people show toward Luciano Pavarotti singing O sole mio or, at best, Nessun dorma it’s all about those immensely amplified F-E-E-L-I-N-G-S, inflated to the size of 800cc silicone mammaries and there was never any space for subtlety or emotional sophistication out there because that was simply not what the fans needed. Probably more than anyone else out there in the Radio Age, Al Jolson was the champion of the «give the people what they want» approach, and if not for the unfortunate practice of blackface (which is, after all, what the people also wanted), Al Jolson should have become the perpetual mascot of the pop market, more relevant in that role today than he’d ever been.
But at least one thing you cannot take away from Al Jolson is that, in his heyday, he was cutting edge at least, in taking the combination of those bombastically orchestrated folk ballads with those soaring melodramatic Yiddishe vocals into the studio and spreading it all over the country. On the other hand, having Jackie Wilson who, for a very brief while, may also have been cutting edge in his R&B showmanship try to put his own early Sixties stamp on a set of Al Jolson’s classics feels almost like an artistic surrender. At his best, with songs like ‘Reet Petite’ or ‘Lonely Teardrops’, Wilson was carrying on Jolson’s torch, but it was fueled by a whole other approach to making music; here, he is simply content with reusing what is left of the old stocks of musical oil, so the whole thing feels decidedly regressive rather than progressive.
Of course, the world has moved on. Better recording equipment, tighter backing bands, louder and more bombastic production values and a powerhouse singer with one of the best throats in the business, making poor old Al with his old-timey crooning feel like a homeless schmuck by comparison. But even if you are a big fan of both Al Jolson (which I am not) and Jackie Wilson (which I am, but strictly limited to the good stuff), I am not entirely sure that You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet shall properly justify its title for you. 1920’s vaudeville remade as early 1960’s orchestrated soul-pop simply may not have been that great an idea.
A song like ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goo’ Bye!’, for instance, works fine as an ass-kickin’ flapper anthem for the Jazz Age and it can even maintain its slightly hooliganish flavor when remade as contemporary pop-rock by the likes of Brenda Lee. But when Jackie decides to open it with a slow, suspenseful soul intro ("I’m telling you baby I’ve gotta leave you now...!"), he sets our expectations up for something completely different and then launches into the very same vaudeville mood of 1922. It’s a crude transition, and since it is right there at the start of the LP, it symbolically tells us that this whole thing probably won’t work. It’s all just a meaningless nostalgia trip.
Now I won’t be taking any real cheap shots, for instance, guffawing at the idea of a black boy from Highland Park, Michigan, trying to put his imprint on a song like ‘My Yiddishe Momme’ considering that the song is placed on a tribute album to a Jewish popular artist who spent half his life performing in blackface, the joke would be on me anyway. (Fun fact, though: apparently, Jolson himself never performed or recorded ‘My Yiddishe Momme’ the song is rather associated with Sophie Tucker so I guess Wilson just put it here as a symbolic nod to Jolson’s ethnic and cultural heritage). Much has been written about the mutual empathy and elements of «cultural symbiosis» between Jewish and Black populations in pre-war America (let my people go and all that), making the gesture feel very reasonable. But it would have felt much more reasonable on the part of somebody like Paul Robeson, the freedom fighter, than Jackie Wilson, the entertainer.
The problem is that throughout the album, Jackie really, really wants to be Al Jolson, the Al Jolson of the Jazz Singer era, but only on those early Sixties’ vocal and instrumental steroids. For sure, he is in peak vocal form, way too peak for my tastes, groveling and worshipping at the altar of these old vaudeville tunes rather than taking them the same way we should be taking them today, or our grandparents should have been taking them in 1961 that is, with a sparkle of irony, perhaps acknowledging their musical merits but chuckling at their emotional innocence and unabashed sentimentality. Quite the opposite: he seems to be taking all of this with far more seriousness than Jolson did himself, and all that bombast which could have, for instance, be successfully applied to a truly modern soul sound (just imagine Jackie Wilson taking on, say, Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ three years later!), is ultimately wasted on corny old-timey trifles with corny old-timey titles like ‘Keep Smiling At Trouble (Trouble’s A Bubble)’.
There are no individual comments I can make on any of these songs: you either appreciate the idea of the album, in which case you’ll sympathize with all of them, fast or slow, danceable or sentimental or you find it crass and mismatched, in which case the album (unlike Al Jolson’s original recordings) will hardly trigger even historical interest: what sort of music history buff might get excited at the perspective of one fluffy pop entertainer paying tribute to another one? At least Jackie had the good sense not to put out any of these covers as singles. But there is hardly a single gesture in his career more symbolic than this one or more telling whenever we begin to wonder about the exact reasons why Jackie Wilson, ruler supreme of the R&B charts for at least half a decade, has been all but forgotten by critical history when so many of his less commercially successful peers have remained far above footnote status in the same history books. https://onlysolitaire.substack.com/p/review-jackie-wilson-you-aint-heard
In a way, though, this album was an inevitability. Tribute LPs to legendary artists from the previous decades were becoming a standard thing in the early Sixties, partially due to the first generations of recorded legends beginning to pass away and partially due to the record industry’s yearning for the «good old clean days»: nothing could wipe off the scum of rock’n’roll better than a reappraisal of the comparatively innocent values of grandpa and grandma music. From LaVern Baker to Sam Cooke, everybody on the R&B circuit was doing these and for Jackie Wilson, Al Jolson probably seemed like the perfect choice: The King Of Black Entertainment paying homage to The King Of Blackface Entertainment. The only problem was that for both artists, «entertainment» meant the visual aspect almost as much as the aural; to complete the comparison, people should not only hear both artists, but see them as well, and you didn’t really get to do that in 1961.
My own problem with Al Jolson, of course, lies not in the blackface department (it is almost undignified to hold lengthy ethical debates on whether we should condemn hundred year old practices), but rather in the fact that Al Jolson arrived on the American pop scene too early to make his presence properly redeemable. The love people had for the guy was the same kind of love people show toward Luciano Pavarotti singing O sole mio or, at best, Nessun dorma it’s all about those immensely amplified F-E-E-L-I-N-G-S, inflated to the size of 800cc silicone mammaries and there was never any space for subtlety or emotional sophistication out there because that was simply not what the fans needed. Probably more than anyone else out there in the Radio Age, Al Jolson was the champion of the «give the people what they want» approach, and if not for the unfortunate practice of blackface (which is, after all, what the people also wanted), Al Jolson should have become the perpetual mascot of the pop market, more relevant in that role today than he’d ever been.
But at least one thing you cannot take away from Al Jolson is that, in his heyday, he was cutting edge at least, in taking the combination of those bombastically orchestrated folk ballads with those soaring melodramatic Yiddishe vocals into the studio and spreading it all over the country. On the other hand, having Jackie Wilson who, for a very brief while, may also have been cutting edge in his R&B showmanship try to put his own early Sixties stamp on a set of Al Jolson’s classics feels almost like an artistic surrender. At his best, with songs like ‘Reet Petite’ or ‘Lonely Teardrops’, Wilson was carrying on Jolson’s torch, but it was fueled by a whole other approach to making music; here, he is simply content with reusing what is left of the old stocks of musical oil, so the whole thing feels decidedly regressive rather than progressive.
Of course, the world has moved on. Better recording equipment, tighter backing bands, louder and more bombastic production values and a powerhouse singer with one of the best throats in the business, making poor old Al with his old-timey crooning feel like a homeless schmuck by comparison. But even if you are a big fan of both Al Jolson (which I am not) and Jackie Wilson (which I am, but strictly limited to the good stuff), I am not entirely sure that You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet shall properly justify its title for you. 1920’s vaudeville remade as early 1960’s orchestrated soul-pop simply may not have been that great an idea.
A song like ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goo’ Bye!’, for instance, works fine as an ass-kickin’ flapper anthem for the Jazz Age and it can even maintain its slightly hooliganish flavor when remade as contemporary pop-rock by the likes of Brenda Lee. But when Jackie decides to open it with a slow, suspenseful soul intro ("I’m telling you baby I’ve gotta leave you now...!"), he sets our expectations up for something completely different and then launches into the very same vaudeville mood of 1922. It’s a crude transition, and since it is right there at the start of the LP, it symbolically tells us that this whole thing probably won’t work. It’s all just a meaningless nostalgia trip.
Now I won’t be taking any real cheap shots, for instance, guffawing at the idea of a black boy from Highland Park, Michigan, trying to put his imprint on a song like ‘My Yiddishe Momme’ considering that the song is placed on a tribute album to a Jewish popular artist who spent half his life performing in blackface, the joke would be on me anyway. (Fun fact, though: apparently, Jolson himself never performed or recorded ‘My Yiddishe Momme’ the song is rather associated with Sophie Tucker so I guess Wilson just put it here as a symbolic nod to Jolson’s ethnic and cultural heritage). Much has been written about the mutual empathy and elements of «cultural symbiosis» between Jewish and Black populations in pre-war America (let my people go and all that), making the gesture feel very reasonable. But it would have felt much more reasonable on the part of somebody like Paul Robeson, the freedom fighter, than Jackie Wilson, the entertainer.
The problem is that throughout the album, Jackie really, really wants to be Al Jolson, the Al Jolson of the Jazz Singer era, but only on those early Sixties’ vocal and instrumental steroids. For sure, he is in peak vocal form, way too peak for my tastes, groveling and worshipping at the altar of these old vaudeville tunes rather than taking them the same way we should be taking them today, or our grandparents should have been taking them in 1961 that is, with a sparkle of irony, perhaps acknowledging their musical merits but chuckling at their emotional innocence and unabashed sentimentality. Quite the opposite: he seems to be taking all of this with far more seriousness than Jolson did himself, and all that bombast which could have, for instance, be successfully applied to a truly modern soul sound (just imagine Jackie Wilson taking on, say, Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ three years later!), is ultimately wasted on corny old-timey trifles with corny old-timey titles like ‘Keep Smiling At Trouble (Trouble’s A Bubble)’.
There are no individual comments I can make on any of these songs: you either appreciate the idea of the album, in which case you’ll sympathize with all of them, fast or slow, danceable or sentimental or you find it crass and mismatched, in which case the album (unlike Al Jolson’s original recordings) will hardly trigger even historical interest: what sort of music history buff might get excited at the perspective of one fluffy pop entertainer paying tribute to another one? At least Jackie had the good sense not to put out any of these covers as singles. But there is hardly a single gesture in his career more symbolic than this one or more telling whenever we begin to wonder about the exact reasons why Jackie Wilson, ruler supreme of the R&B charts for at least half a decade, has been all but forgotten by critical history when so many of his less commercially successful peers have remained far above footnote status in the same history books. https://onlysolitaire.substack.com/p/review-jackie-wilson-you-aint-heard
You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet
