Today in History—October 6: The Jazz Singer Upends the Movie Industry

On this day in 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered in New York City, thrilling audiences with its novel use of synchronized sound. When the film’s star, Al Jolson, appeared onscreen, moviegoers were amazed to hear his real singing and speaking voice and see that it lined up perfectly with his projected image.

Within several months, The Jazz Singer had become a box office success for its studio, Warner Brothers. However, the film has a complex legacy because of its prominent use of blackface, the theatrical makeup used to crudely caricature African Americans.

The story of Hollywood’s transition to sound and The Jazz Singer’s role in that change is also complex. Prior to the debut of the film, Warner Brothers had already released some 150 movie shorts as well as one feature, Don Juan (1926), that used the Vitaphone system that enabled synchronized sound.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

The incremental advance of The Jazz Singer was including synchronized singing and spoken dialogue in a feature-length movie. But even those sections amount to only about one-fourth of the film’s total runtime. Most of the dialogue is delivered in the written intertitles that are the hallmark of silent films. The first genuinely all-talkie feature, Lights of New York, was not released until the following July.

If The Jazz Singer was forward-thinking in its technical aspects, its depiction of Jolson wearing blackface was rooted in a discriminatory status quo. The song-and-dance man was a big vaudeville star at the time, and he’d used blackface in his act for decades. Many other performers had donned the racist makeup going back to the 1830s. It remained a staple of popular entertainment in 1927. Today, Jolson’s appearance in blackface is a disturbing sight.

The Jazz Singer became the one film most associated with the transition to sound and a lauded part of Hollywood history. That fact was recognized as early as 1929, when, at the very first Academy Awards ceremony, Warner Brothers won an honorary Oscar for “producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry.”