Jolson, Al

When he exclaimed: “You ain't heard nothin' yet,” in the film The Jazz Singer (1927), Al Jolson wasn't exaggerating. The world had never heard—or seen—anyone quite like the star of this, the first talking picture.

The man who called himself “The World's Greatest Entertainer” had begun making good on that claim two decades before The Jazz Singer. During the early 1900s, Jolson had been a minstrel-show sensation and in the following decade became...