Rock-a-bye

The wham of Sammy

It's been decades since Sammy Davis Jr. riled up black leaders by pledging his support for Richard Nixon as a presidential candidate, but the ghost of the Tricky One still haunts the legacy of the Candy Man. Within weeks of the release of Yes I Can! The Sammy Davis Jr. Story, Rhino's majestic four-disc celebration of the wham that was Sam, Nixon got a reissue of his own: the latest installment of his tape rants and raves to H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman.

As the Chicago Tribune reported it, the recording's hit single has an A-side of Nixon going after those "little Negro bastards" and confessing, "I have the greatest affection for them, but they're not going to make it for 500 years." On the flip, it's Nixon connecting a gay-themed All in the Family episode to the homo ruin of the Roman empire. Sammy was one of those little bastards, not to mention the Bunkers' most unwanted house guest. The irony, of course, is that it was a miscegenation-panicking Kennedy, not Nixon, who disinvited Sammy and his Swedish wife to his inauguration. Nixon let Sammy crash in, of all places, the Lincoln bedroom.

Sammy's Nixon advocacy only fueled the Uncle Tom accusations he'd been enduring since the '50s. In an essay that accompanies the new box set, Gerald Early argues that Sammy was one of the first black entertainers who actively sought the approval of white audiences on his own terms, stripping off as many of the grins and shuffles of the minstrel mask as he could under the weight of history. His interracial marriage, his greased-down and conked hair, his committed integrationist civil-rights work, and his trademark tux-and-cigarette Rat Pack dalliances with his white pallies put Sammy in a precarious position with the black press, which often saw him working too hard to please the man in the name of racial brotherhood. "I was a member of the black race," Sammy wrote in his second autobiography, Why Me?, "not the black community." It's easy to forget all this as you make your way through The Sammy Davis Jr. Story because it mostly consists of the studio Sammy, and on record Sammy was a belting showman, not a joke-slinging race man. He saved that for his live shows, where he reliably got raw with melodramatic, shticky, high-gloss medley marathons that were "show business" at its wink-and-nod best.

Midway through disc four we get the entire Sammy race debate boiled down into one extraordinary, irritating, liberating performance: Sammy doing "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody" at the Coconut Grove in 1963. Nowhere is Early's claim that Sammy was "The Man Who Linked the African-American Minstrel Past with the Future of the Corporate Mainstream of Commercial Art" more readily audible than in Sammy's rendition of this 1918 Tin Pan Alley mammy song that was a number one hit for blackface's giddiest poster boy, Al Jolson. In a 1927 Warner Bros. Vitaphone sound experiment (it was released as a short called "Al Jolson in a Plantation Act"), Jolson sang it as he barreled out of a slave cabin. With its maternal and mythical Southern homeland, "Rock-a-Bye" is a vintage plantation fantasy that even quotes from two 19th-century Stephen Foster "darky songs": "The Old Folks at Home" and "Old Black Joe," Foster's degrading Uncle Tom take on a shuffling and head-bowed slave.

On stage at the Coconut Grove, it's clear just how deeply Sammy knows all this. He understands that its roots in minstrelsy and its racial masquerade are precisely what have made "Rock-a-Bye" what he calls "the most sung song in America," a must for anyone "in love with the nostalgia of show business." But still, Davis can't bring himself to sing the "A million baby kisses I'll deliver/The minute that you sing the Swanee River" line in his own voice, so he goes into a dead-on Jolson impression and does whiteface on blackface: Sammy as Jolson as an imaginary black man.

He sings just four lines of the song straight. The rest is 10 minutes of Vegas showroom deconstruction. He interrupts verses, goofs on lyrics, then does a string of impressions of other entertainers singing "Rock-a-Bye" (Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, James Cagney). Not only does this absolve him from having to sing "Rock-a-Bye" himself, it also lets him break the song into so many vocal pieces that its meanings and momentum become defused and unrecognizable.

When Sammy comes back into his own voice in the song's last line, it's too late. He's performed it without performing it, turned a song embedded in pop-culture histories of white-on-black racial mimicry as old as the nation itself into his own Walk of Fame mimic revue. That Sammy went down to Dixie with his tongue in his cheek the same year as the march on Washington doesn't make his performance any more political, just more loaded, more relevant, more Sammy.