1866-1950
Performer

The World's Greatest Entertainer.

According to different sources Asa Yoelson was born in Russia or in Washington, D.C. As a boy he sang in the streets and in saloons, running away from his Orthodox Jewish home several times in attempts to break into show business. At fifteen he was performing in vaudeville. By 1906 Jolson was working in blackface.

Mammy.

From the mid nineteenth century through the 1920s whites and blacks in burnt cork or grease paint performed exaggerated and distorted versions of black material. These acts — in and out of minstrel shows — were extremely popular with white audiences and frequently featured blacked-up whites yearning to return to the South. This nostalgia for a way of life that the audiences had never experienced may have resulted from the familial yearnings of immigrant groups. Jolson was by far the most successful of the...