Review Essay: "Something You Don't Expect": The Recordings of Bert Williams

Abstract

Williams: Middle Years, 1910-1918. Archeophone, 2002. $17.75 CD. Williams: His Final Releases, 1919-1922. Archeophone, 2001. $17.75 CD. Everybody, it seems, has an opinion on Williams. Unfortunately, Williams is known today more by his reputation than his repertoire. Whether praised as a comic genius or vilified as a burnt cork darky stereotype, Williams suffers from a tragic lack of reissue projects has kept his recorded legacy nearly a secret from current generations. reissue of his complete extant works as they are being released on Archeophone label, however, makes Williams' fascinating, highly entertaining, historically important work available for re-evaluation and demonstrates just how talented, important, and influential a figure he was, a figure even Booker T. Washington acknowledged had done more for African Americans than Washington himself had done: has smiled his into people's hearts. I have been obliged to fight my way (Charters 6). We wear mask, Paul Laurence Dunbar began his famous poem of same name, that grins and lies, and in a particularly poignant this was true of one of great comedians of twentieth century, Egbert Austin Bert Williams. Born in 1874, light-skinned Williams, of Danish and West Indian extraction, from a well-to-do background in Antigua, found himself relegated to lower socioeconomic rungs in this country with rest of his darker-skinned brethren when he and his family moved to San Francisco in 1885. When he discovered his talent as a mimic at a young age, he sought work in shows, but ultimately wound up performing on streets and in clubs on Barbary Coast after his graduation from high school and brief attendance at Leland Stanford University. That is, until a felicitous sequence of events paired him with George Walker and set two on a bumpy road toward stardom in touring shows of day. Although two initially scorned grotesque blackface minstrel stereotypes had been in force for half a century, they eventually capitulated to demands for lying, thieving, shiftless, superstitious, gullible, ignorant, lazy, or dandified and comically vain images fed feelings of white superiority as they appeared on stage. While other shows advertised presence of blackface coons, Williams and Walker advertised themselves as The Two Real Coons, doing their best to please predominantly white crowds while lending an air of dignity to figures draped in shameful indignities and shuffling under a shock of artificial kinky hair. They were a huge hit in such shows as Clorindy (where they popularized cakewalk), A Lucky Coon, Bandanna Land, and In Dahomey. Williams later went on to star with Ziegfeld Follies after George Walker fell ill. All while, he lamented his lot as an educated, upper class African American longing for mainstream respectability would not be offered to him. He was quoted as saying in his understated there was nothing disgraceful about being colored, but he often found it inconvenient--in America (Charters 12). James Weldon Johnson would use quote in his passing novel of 1912, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (155). Johnson also commented in chapter seven of novel Here was a man who made people laugh at size of his mouth, while he carried in his heart a burning ambition to be a tragedian; and so after all he did play a part in a tragedy (105-06), particularly since, as Johnson recalled in Along This Way, his actual demeanor was entirely unrecognizable as shambling, shuffling 'darkey' he impersonated on stage (Jasen 48). It was a quote could well be applied to Williams, who was called by fellow Ziegfeld performer W. C. Fields the funniest man I ever saw, and saddest man I ever knew (Debus, His Final Releases). While seen as a natural at what he did, ironically Williams in fact had to learn dialect he mastered for his audience since his own background and diction placed him far from Southern stereotype. …