Bert Williams
Bert Williams was a Bahamian-born American entertainer, one of the pre-eminent entertainers of the vaudeville era and one of the most popular comedians for all audiences of his time. While some sources have credited him as being the first Black man to have a leading role in a film with Darktown Jubilee in 1914, other sources have credited actor Sam Lucas with this same distinction for a different 1914 film, the World Film Company's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ebony stated that "Darktown Follies was the first attempt of an independent film company to star a black actor in a movie", and credited the work as beginning a period in independent American cinema that explored "black themes" within works made for African-American audiences by independent producers.
Williams was by far the best-selling Black recording artist before 1920. In 1918, the New York Dramatic Mirror called Williams "one of the great comedians of the world."
Williams was a key figure in the development of African-American entertainment. In an age when racial inequality and stereotyping were commonplace, he became the first Black person to take a lead role on the Broadway stage and did much to push back racial barriers during his three-decade-long career. Fellow vaudevillian W. C. Fields, who appeared in productions with Williams, described him as "the funniest man I ever saw—and the saddest man I ever knew."
Early life
Williams was born in Nassau, The Bahamas, on November 12, 1874, to Frederick Williams Jr. and his wife Julia. At the age of either two or three, Williams permanently emigrated with his parents to the US. Their names all appear in the 1880 United States Federal Census. They are shown as residents of New York City, and Bert is listed as five years old at the time. Having made his way to California by his late teens, he joined different West Coast minstrel shows, including Martin and Selig's Mastodon Minstrels in 1893 San Francisco, where he first met his future professional partner, George Walker.Williams and Walker performed song-and-dance numbers, comic dialogues and skits and humorous songs. They fell into stereotypical vaudevillian roles: originally Williams portrayed a slick conniver, while Walker played the "dumb coon" victim of Williams' schemes. They discovered that they got a better reaction by switching roles and subverting expectations. The sharp-featured and slender Walker eventually developed a persona as a strutting dandy, while the stocky Williams played the languorous oaf. Despite his thickset physique, Williams was a master of body language and physical "stage business." A New York Times reviewer wrote: "He holds a face for minutes at a time, seemingly, and when he alters it, bring a laugh by the least movement."
In late 1896, the pair were added to The Gold Bug, a struggling musical. The show did not survive, but Williams & Walker got good reviews and were able to secure higher profile bookings. They headlined the Koster and Bial's vaudeville house for 36 weeks in 1896–97, where their spirited version of the cakewalk helped popularize the dance. The pair performed in burnt-cork blackface, as was customary at the time, billing themselves as "Two Real Coons" to distinguish their act from the many white minstrels also performing in blackface. Williams also made his first recordings in 1896, but none is known to survive. They participated in a "Benefit for New York's Poor" held on February 9, 1897, at the Metropolitan Opera House, their only appearance at that theater.
While playing off the "coon" formula, Williams & Walker's act and demeanor subtly undermined it as well. Camille Forbes wrote, "They called into question the possible realness of blackface performers who only emphasized their artificiality by recourse to burnt cork; after all, Williams did not really need the burnt cork to be Black," despite his lighter skin complexion. He would pull on a wig full of kinky hair to help conceal his wavy hair. Terry Waldo noted the layered irony in their cakewalk routine, which presented them as mainstream Blacks performing a dance in a way that lampooned whites who had mocked a Black dance that originally satirized plantation whites' ostentatiously fussy mannerisms. The pair also made sure to present themselves as immaculately groomed and classily dressed in their publicity photos, which were used for advertising and on the covers of sheet music promoting their songs. Thus, they drew a contrast between their real-life comportment and the comical characters they portrayed onstage. This aspect of their act was ambiguous enough that some Black newspapers criticized the duo for failing to uplift the dignity of their race.
In 1899, Williams surprised his partner George Walker and his family when he announced he had recently married Charlotte Thompson, a singer with whom he had worked professionally, in a very private ceremony. Lottie was a widow eight years Bert's senior. Thus, the match seemed odd to some who knew the gregarious and constantly traveling Williams, but all who knew them considered them a uniquely happy couple, and the union lasted until his death. The Williamses never had children biologically, but they adopted and reared three of Lottie's nieces. They also frequently sheltered orphans and foster children in their homes.
Williams & Walker appeared in a succession of shows, including A Senegambian Carnival, A Lucky Coon, and The Policy Players. Their stars were on the ascent, but they still faced vivid reminders of the limits placed on them by white society. In August 1900, in New York City, hysterical rumors of a white detective having been shot by a Black man erupted into an uncontained riot. Unaware of the street violence, Williams & Walker left their theater after a performance and parted ways. Williams headed off in a fortunate direction, but Walker was yanked from a streetcar by a white mob and was beaten.
''Sons of Ham'' and ''In Dahomey''
The following month, Williams & Walker had their greatest success to date with Sons of Ham, a broad farce that did not include any of the extreme "darkie" stereotypes that were then common. One of the show's songs, "Miss Hannah from Savannah," even touched upon class divisions within the Black community. The pair had already begun to transition away from racial minstrel conventions to a fuller human style of comedy. In 1901, they recorded 13 discs for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Some of these, such as "The Phrenologist Coon", were standard blackface material, but the financial lament "When It's All Going Out and Nothing Coming In" was race-blind and became one of Williams's best-known songs. Another Williams composition, "Good Morning Carrie", was covered by many artists, becoming one of the biggest hits of 1901. These discs existed only in pressings of fewer than 1,000 and were not heard by many listeners. Sons of Ham ran for two years.In September 1902, Williams & Walker debuted their next vehicle, In Dahomey, a full-length musical written, directed and performed by an all-Black cast. It was an even bigger hit. In 1903 the production, with music by composer Will Marion Cook, book by Shipp, and lyrics by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, moved to New York City. Part of the inspiration for the show was Williams' copy of a 1670 book, Africa, in which author John Ogilby traced the history of the continent's tribes and peoples. "With this volume, I could prove that every Pullman porter is the descendant of a king," said Williams.
This show was a landmark event, as it was the first such musical to be produced at a major Broadway theater. Seating inside the theater was segregated. One of the musical's songs, "I'm a Jonah Man", helped codify Williams' hard-luck persona and tales of woe. It helped to establish the character which Williams played most frequently in his career: the slow-talking, deep-thinking victim of life's misfortunes. "Even if it rained soup," Williams later explained, " would be found with a fork in his hand and no spoon in sight." However, Williams and Walker were ebullient about their Broadway breakthrough, which came years after they had established themselves as profitable stage stars. Williams wrote, "We'd get near enough to hear the Broadway audiences applaud sometimes, but it was some one else they were applauding. I used to be tempted to beg for a $15 job in a chorus just for one week so as to be able to say I'd been on Broadway once." Walker recalled, "Some years ago we were doing a dance before an east side audience. They gave us a hand, and I called out to them, 'Some day we'll do this dance on Broadway!' Then they gave us the laugh. Just the same we gave Broadway that same dance."
In Dahomey traveled to London, where it was enthusiastically received. A command performance was given at Buckingham Palace in June 1903. The show's British tour continued through June 1904. In May, Williams and Walker were both initiated into the Edinburgh Lodge of the Freemasons; the Scottish Masons did not racially discriminate as the United States chapters did, including those of the northern states.|
''Abyssinia'' and recording success
The duo's international success established them as the most visible Black performers in the world. They hoped to parlay this renown into a new, more elaborate and costly stage production, to be shown in the top-flight theaters. Williams and Walker's management team balked at the expense of this project, then sued the pair to prevent them from securing outside investors or representation. Filings in the suit revealed that each member of the team had earned approximately $120,000 from 1902 to 1904, or $ apiece in dollars. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, and Williams and Walker accepted an offer from Hammerstein's Victoria Theatre, the premiere vaudeville house in New York. A white Southern monologist objected to the integrated bill, but the show went ahead with Williams and Walker and without the objector.In February 1906, Abyssinia, with a score co-written by Williams, premiered at the Majestic Theater. The show, which included live camels, was another smash. Aspects of the production continued the duo's cagey steps toward greater creative pride and freedom for Black performers. The nation of Abyssinia was the only African nation to remain sovereign during European colonization, repelling Italy's attempts at control in 1896. The show also included inklings of a love story, something that had never been tolerated in a Black stage production before. Walker played a Kansas tourist while his wife, Aida, portrayed an Abyssinian princess. A scene between the two of them, while comic, presented Walker as a nervous suitor.
While the show was praised, many white critics were uncomfortable or uncertain about its cast's ambitions. One critic declared that audiences "do not care to see their own ways copied when they can have the real thing better done by white people," while the New York Evening Post thought the score "is at times too elaborate for them and a return to the plantation melodies would be a great improvement upon the 'grand opera' type, for which they are not suited either by temperament or by education." The Chicago Tribune remarked, disapprovingly, "there is hardly a trace of negroism in the play." George Walker was unbowed, telling the Toledo Bee: "It's all rot, this slapstick bandanna handkerchief bladder in the face act, with which negro acting is associated. It ought to die out and we are trying to kill it." Though the flashier Walker rarely had qualms about opposing the racial prejudice and limitations of the day, the more introspective and brooding Williams internalized his feelings.
Williams committed many of Abyssinias songs to disc and cylinder. One of them, "Nobody", became his signature theme, and the song he is best remembered for today. It is a doleful and ironic composition, replete with his dry observational wit, and is perfectly complemented by Williams' intimate, half-spoken singing style.
Williams became so identified with the song that he was obliged to sing it in almost every appearance for the rest of his life. He considered its success both blessing and curse: "Before I got through with 'Nobody,' I could have wished that both the author of the words and the assembler of the tune had been strangled or drowned.... 'Nobody' was a particularly hard song to replace." "Nobody" remained active in Columbia's sales catalogue into the 1930s, and the musicologist Tim Brooks estimates that it sold between 100,000 and 150,000 copies, a phenomenally high number for the era.
Williams' languorous, drawling delivery would become the primary selling point of several similarly structured Williams recordings, such as "Constantly" and "I'm Neutral". Williams even recorded two compositions entitled "Somebody" and "Everybody". His style was inimitable. In an era when the most popular songs were simultaneously promoted by several artists, Williams' repertoire was left comparatively untouched by competing singers. Describing his character's style and the appeal it had with audiences, he said: "When he talks to you it is as if he has a secret to confide that concerns just you two."
Williams and Walker were prominent success stories for the Black community, and they received both extensive press coverage and frequent admonitions to properly "represent the race." Leading Black newspapers mounted campaigns against demeaning stereotypes such as the word "coon." Williams & Walker were sympathetic, but also had their careers to consider, where they performed before many white audiences. The balancing act between their audience's expectations and their artistic impulses was tricky.
In his only known essay, Williams wrote: