Notes

The following first appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

If ever there was  a man whose life embodied the fickle ironies of fame, it was Bert Williams. 

As a black American  artist who struggled against the pernicious racism of his time, it surely would have broken his heart to see his work almost forgotten by subsequent generations.  At the dawn of the 20th century, he had been the king of comedy, but by the time of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s, Williams was more often remembered — when he was remembered at all — as a shuffling blackface Uncle Tom, a ghastly relic of minstrelry. 

Such was always the fate of America’s first black superstar.  His good friend and occasional co-star W.C. Fields once said of Williams, “He was the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.”  Even at the height of his career, Bert Williams was ever the outsider.

For decades an icon of stage comedy, Williams glided easily past the vaudeville proscenium into the nascent film and recording industries, amassed a large personal fortune and played at the personal invitation of royalty.  First with his long-time comedy partner George Walker, and then (after venereal disease put an early end to Walker’s career) as a solo act, Williams set one ground-breaking precedent after another. 

He helped launch one of America’s earliest dance crazes, the Cakewalk, in 1896.  His half-spoken, half-sung rendition of songs like “Nobody” (covered in recent years by the late Johnny Cash) sold thousands of folios and wax cylinders.  When he was hired by Florenz Ziegfeld in 1912, he became the first black man to play in a mixed-race show, and would eventually become the first to star in his own series of comedic film shorts, some years later. 

But despite this overwhelming success  — unusual in those days, even for a white performer — Williams was rarely accepted by the white world in which he worked.  When he joined Ziegfeld’s Follies, many of the caucasian cast-members complained loudly and refused to socialize with Williams.  His contract mandated that he could not appear onstage with a white woman, limiting the subject matter for the skits in which he appeared.  Once, when the rest of the Follies cast walked off the set during a union strike, no one bothered to tell Williams.  He arrived at the theater that night, applied his makeup and only learned there was no show when he stepped out into an empty auditorium.

If you’d like to own some of Williams’ music for yourself, visit Archeophone Records.  Archeophone is a label that specializes in music from the earliest days of the recording industry, and offers three annotated volumes of Bert Williams’ recordings from 1901 to 1922.