Williams, Bert 1874–1922

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Bert Williams 1874–1922

Comedian, songwriter

Bert Williams was a great comedian, but his life and career was still touched by the great American tragedy of racism. Williams was a pioneer African American theatrical performer, helping to found a long tradition of all-black stage productions, and also rising to the top of the white-dominated entertainment scene of his day. Yet his successes came in a medium that expressed in the most fundamental way whites’ dehumanization of their black compatriots: the blackface minstrel show. Williams was a black man who worked under a mask—under the crude white image of blackness. According to early Williams biographer Mabel Rowland, white film comedian W. C. Fields called Williams “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.”

The performer who became famous for his comic renditions of American black life was in fact a foreigner by birth. Bert Williams was born Egbert Austin Williams on November 12, 1874 at Nassau, in the Bahamas. His father was a waiter and occasional seafaring man, and his paternal grandfather may have been a Danish diplomat. Apart from a brief interlude in New York when Williams was two years old, the family lived in the Bahamas until about 1885.

Family Settled in California

Williams grew up with no memory of slavery, his speech unmarked by a black American accent, and over his whole life in the United States, he found the daily slights and insults to which American blacks were subjected especially hard to take. One widely quoted remark gives the flavor of his understated but strong responses to racial prejudice: “In truth, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have found it inconvenient—in America.”

The Williams family emigrated first to Florida, then to the fruit-belt town of Riverside, California. An imaginative youth with a preference for mimicry and storytelling, Williams dreamed of a degree from Stanford University but lacked the resources to pursue a higher education, although he remained an avid reader for his entire life. Instead, he drifted into the rough-and-tumble entertainment world of San Francisco’s barrooms and music halls. Although he struggled for several years, Williams during this period met and joined forces with George Walker

At a Glance…

Born November 12, 1874, in Nassau, the Bahamas; died March 4, 1922 in New York City; son of Frederick (a waiter) and Julia (an Antiguan clergyman’s daughter); married Charlotte (Lottie) Thompson in 1900. Education; Attended high school in Riverside, California. Religion: Episcopal.

Career: Comedian and songwriter. Worked as entertainer in San Francisco and northern California, mid-1890s; formed (with George Walker) Williams and Walker vaudeville team, 1895; appeared in The Gold Bug, 1896; premiered pioneer all-black production, In Dahomey, 1902; gave private performance for King of England, 1903; premiered shows Abyssinia 1906, Bandanna Land 1908, and others; embarked on solo career after Walker’s illness, 1909; signed with Ziegfeld Follies variety show, 1910.

Memberships: Member, St. Andrew’s Chapter, International Order of Masons (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1903 until death; joined Scottish organization during tour of British Isles because of race restrictions in American Masonic Order.

around 1893; the two remained on-stage partners and friends until Walker’s death in 1911.

Among the few opportunities available to African American musical performers at the turn of the century was the minstrel show, originated by whites as a caricature of black life, but later taken up by blacks, who softened its racist edges and adapted it for their own purposes. When Williams and Walker moved east in 1895, they turned to minstrel stereotypes and billed themselves for a time as “The Two Real Coons.” In a Detroit performance Williams applied the burnt-cork blackface makeup over his own black skin for a performance of a song called “Oh, I Don’t Know, You’re Not So Warm.” “Nobody was more surprised than I was when it went like a house on fire,” he said and was recounted in Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams “Then I began to find myself. It was not until I was able to see myself as another person that my sense of humor developed,” he continued.

Capitalized on Cakewalk Craze

Williams and Walker settled in New York, and their fortunes immediately began to improve. Soon after their arrival in 1896 they appeared in The Gold Bug, a musical by the young Austrian immigrant Victor Herbert, and afterwards were signed to appear at the popular Koster and Bial’s Music Hall. They rode the crest of the cakewalk dance craze, one of the nation’s first black-inspired popular fads; at one point the two partners posted a mock cakewalk challenge on the front door of the tycoon William Henry Vanderbilt.

Appearing in a series of musical productions that played in progressively larger and more prestigious theaters, they broke through in 1902 with In Dahomey, a musical with a vaguely African theme composed by the black songwriter Will Marion Cook, with some contributions by the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar. No prior production had relied as thoroughly on black creative talent as did In Dahomey, and none had succeeded as well in reaching white as well as black audiences. Williams and Walker the following year took the show on tour to England, where King Edward VII eventually requested a private performance.

Their reputation assured, Williams and Walker found success with a string of productions that included Bandanna Land and Abyssinia While they worked as a duo, Williams often portrayed, in writer Ann Charters’ words, “the awkward, stubbornly bumbling clown” to Walker’s “arrogant, flamboyant dandy.” After ill health sidelined Walker in 1909, Williams joined the Ziegfeld Follies, the premier variety show of its day. This essentially made him the first black star of a prominent white theater company, and Williams rose to the challenge with an emerging development of his comic persona.

Developed Melancholy Comic Style

Earlier in the decade Williams had premiered a song composed by Alex Rogers called “I’m a Jonah Man;” it became one of his signature numbers and forecast the emotional tenor of his performances in later years. Williams became, much like the silent film star Charlie Chaplin, a melancholy comedian of hard luck. The “Jonah Man” identity tapped his own deep frustrations and at the same time raised his comic art to a universal level.

One song that captured the essence of his art was “Nobody,” with text by Rogers and music by Williams himself; it was introduced in 1905 and remained a fixture of Williams’ appearances for the rest of his life. Pretending to read the words laboriously from a small pad of paper, Williams declaimed: “When life seems full of clouds and rain—And I am full of nothin’ but pain— Who soothes my thumpin’, bumpin’ brain?—Nobody!” Williams’ relaxed, half-spoken and half-sung delivery influenced later performers; his success blazed the way for them.

Williams remained an established star until his sudden death from pneumonia, compounded by long-standing heart problems, on March 4, 1922. He had collapsed during a Detroit performance of his new production, Under the Bamboo Tree Tributes flowed in from such luminaries of the theater world as George M. Cohan; many such tributes were collected in Mabel Rowland’s 1923 biography Bert Williams: Son of Laughter, which showed the high regard in which Williams was held by his theatrical contemporaries, black and white. Never able to escape the impact of racism, working within the prison of one of its most bizarre manifestations, Bert Williams transmuted his suffering into humor. In his memory, Rowland quoted the words of historian W. E. B. DuBois: “For this was not mere laughing: it was the smile that hovered above blood and tragedy; the light mask of happiness that hid breaking hearts and bitter souls.”