236 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
Sinbad introduced three big hit songs, all of them sung by Jolson. All three
were interpolations by song writers other than Romberg, brought into the show
at the star’s initiative. Jolson played an African American porter, a role he per-
formed in blackface—a reminder of minstrelsy’s long reach into later eras. By
improbable plot devices, Jolson’s black porter fi nds himself transported to Bagh-
dad, where he meets Sinbad and other fi gures from the Arabian Nights. To estab-
lish the character’s background, Romberg wrote “I Hail from Cairo,” a comic
song with a punch line about Cairo, Illinois. Early in the show’s run, Jolson tired
of this number and replaced it with a more emphatically Southern song, “Rock-
a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” with music by Jean Schwartz and lyrics
by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis, three Tin Pan Alley stalwarts. Still later in the
run, that song was replaced with “My Mammy,” by the same lyricists, with music
by Walter Donaldson. Finally, after the show left Broadway and went on tour in
1920, the spot was fi lled with “Swanee,” the fi rst great hit for twenty-one-year-old
George Gershwin, working with lyricist Irving Caesar. All three songs express a
black persona’s longing for a Southern home and family—the topic Stephen Fos-
ter had explored more than half a century earlier with “Old Folks at Home,” a
song directly quoted in “Swanee.”
All three songs also entered Jolson’s permanent repertory, and he sang them
for years on stage, screen, radio, and phonograph records. Although Sinbad’s
thirteen-month run made it a substantial hit show by the standards of the day,
it then disappeared and has never been revived, whereas its interpolated songs,
closely associated with Jolson but also sung and played by countless others, are
still recognized by many music lovers today. Thus, like most early musical come-
dies, Sinbad was of lasting importance only as a delivery system for popular songs.
In the early years of the twentieth century, many of the best popular songs—
whether introduced to the public in musical comedy, revue, or vaudeville—were
imbued with the fl avor of ragtime. The origins of ragtime lie in the activities of
black musicians in the decades after the Civil War.THE RISE OF RAGTIME
Before the Civil War, the popularity of the minstrel show (see chapter 6) had
demonstrated a widespread fascination among white audiences with black
music, even if that music was presented only through the distorted fi lter of white
performers in blackface. Minstrelsy set the stage for the careers of professional
African American entertainers after the war, both for better, in that minstrelsy
had whetted audiences’ appetites for real black entertainment, and for worse, in
that African Americans had to accommodate their artistic expressions to min-
strelsy’s stereotypes of black culture. Either way, with the slowly rising fortunes
of African Americans came new opportunities for black musicians.BLACK MUSICAL ASPIRATIONS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
Black musicians’ diffi cult road to artistic recognition is inseparable from the strug-
gles of the four million people who emerged from slavery at the end of the Civil
War. Although new amendments to the Constitution guaranteed these new citi-
zens full equal rights under the law, for decades to come those rights would exist
more in theory than in practice. Sharecropping, in which tenant farmers worked“Swanee”172028_10_231-253_r2_mr.indd 236 23/01/13 10:26 AM