Jazz Kids on Screen

Filmed sequences of children performing jazz songs capture a child’s body housing a voice rooted in imitation; they announce themselves as images of play. Yet, during the conversion era, the children singing jazz on screen were almost always white. Thus, their freedom to mimic the voices of Black singers reveals two uncomfortable truths: 1. Idealizing childhood naturalized the practice of musical appropriation that shaped Americans’ conception of “jazz”; and 2. “Childhood” has never been an idea equally available to every young person. This article interrogates the value of the child performer for jazz songs on film in the early sound era by attending to several primary figures: Bobby Gordon, who plays young Jakie in The Jazz Singer (dir. Alan Crosland, 1927), as well as Baby Rose Marie, Shirley Temple, Mitzi Green, and Sybil Jason. A child singing jazz is an image of impossibility, a fantasy about American music, American cinema, and American childhood that provides an emotional catharsis, even as economic conditions threatened the romanticized view of children’s lives that social reformers had fought for decades to bring to fruition.