Williams, Bert

November 12, 1874?
March 4, 1922

It is likely, though unconfirmed, that Egbert Austin "Bert" Williams was born in Antigua, the West Indies, on November 12, 1874. In 1885 he moved with his parents, Fred and Julia, to Riverside, California, where his father became a railroad conductor. After high school, Bert moved to San Francisco, seeking an entertainment career. He sang in rough saloons, toured lumber camps in a small minstrel troupe, learned minstrel dialect, became a comedian, and in 1893 formed a partnership with George Walker that lasted sixteen years and brought them fame.

After years of trial and error, by 1896 they had evolved their act—the classic minstrel contrast of the "darky" and the "dandy." The large, light-skinned Williams used black-face makeup, ill-fitting clothes, heavy dialect, and a shuffle to play hapless bumblers while the smaller, darker Walker played well-dressed, cocky, nimble-footed hustlers. In 1899, they launched the first of a string of successful African-American musicals, A Lucky Coon. In 1903, In Dahomey, with exotic African elements, exciting chorus numbers, hard-luck songs and comedy for Williams, and snappy dances and a wise-guy role for Walker, brought them international acclaim, from appearances on Broadway to a command performance at Buckingham Palace in London. Their successes continued until Walker fell ill and retired in 1909.

Without Walker, Williams became a "single" in vaudeville and in 1910 was the first African American to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies. He was at the center of American show business, where he remained—in the Follies (1910–1912, 1914–1917, 1919), other top-notch revues and vaudeville (1913, 1918), and his own shows (1920–1922). A master of pantomime, pathos, understatement, and timing, he gave universal appeal to his poignant hit songs, such as "Nobody" and "I'm a Jonah Man," and his comedy sketches of sad-sack bellhops, gamblers, and porters, despite heavy dialect and caricatures. The critic Ashton Stevens in 1910 hailed Williams as "the Mark Twain of his color," whose "kindly, infectious human … made humans of us all."

Williams felt blackface and dialect liberated him as a comedian by letting him become "another person" onstage, but offstage this racially stereotyped minstrel mask stifled a man who longed to be accepted as a human being. "Bert Williams is the funniest man I ever saw," observed Follies veteran W. C. Fields, "and the saddest man I ever knew." Suffering discrimination and rejection everywhere except onstage and at home with his devoted wife, Lottie, whom he married in 1900, he became a heavy drinker plagued by depression. Despite failing health, he drove himself mercilessly onstage, where he was happiest. On February 25, 1922, weakened by pneumonia, he struggled through a matinee of his new show, Under the Bamboo Tree. During the performance that evening, he collapsed. He died a week later.

See also Minstrels/Minstrelsy; Musical Theater; Walker, George

Bibliography

Charters, Ann. Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

Rowland, Mabel, ed. Bert Williams, Son of Laughter. Reprint. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

Smith, Eric Ledell. Bert Williams: A Biography of the Pioneer Black Comedian. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1992.

Toll, Robert C. On with the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 121–133.

Williams, Bert. "The Comic Side of Trouble." American Magazine 85 (January 1918): 33–35, 58–61.

robert c. toll (1996)
Updated bibliography