Review Essay: “Something You Don’t Expect”: The Recordings of Bert Williams

Bert Williams: The Middle Years, 1910-1918. Archeophone, 2002. $17.75 CD. Bert Williams: His Final Releases, 1919-1922. Archeophone, 2001. $17.75 CD. Everybody, it seems, has an opinion on Bert Williams. Unfortunately, Williams is often 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 that has kept his recorded legacy nearly a secret from current generations. The reissue of his complete extant works as they are being released on the 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 that even Booker T. Washington acknowledged had done more for African Americans than Washington himself had done: "He has smiled his way into people's hearts. I have been obliged to fight my way" (Charters 6). "We wear the mask," Paul Laurence Dunbar began his famous poem of the same name, "that grins and lies," and in a particularly poignant way this was true of one of the great comedians of the twentieth century, Egbert Austin "Bert" Williams. Born in 1874, the light-skinned Williams, of Danish and West Indian extraction, from a well-to-do background in Antigua, found himself relegated to the lower socioeconomic rungs in this country with the 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 stage shows, but ultimately wound up performing on the streets and in clubs on the 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 the two on a bumpy road toward stardom in the touring stage shows of the day. Although the two initially scorned the grotesque blackface minstrel stereotypes that had been in force for half a century, they eventually capitulated to the demands for the lying, thieving, shiftless, superstitious, gullible, ignorant, lazy, or dandified and comically vain images that fed feelings of white superiority as they appeared on the stage. While other shows advertised the 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 stage shows as Clorindy (where they popularized the cakewalk), A Lucky Coon, Bandanna Land, and In Dahomey. Williams later went on to star with the Ziegfeld Follies after George Walker fell ill. All the while, he lamented his lot as an educated, upper class African American longing for the mainstream respectability that would not be offered to him. He was quoted as saying in his understated way that there was nothing disgraceful about being "colored," but he "often found it inconvenient--in America" (Charters 12). James Weldon Johnson would use the quote in his "passing" novel of 1912, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (155). Johnson also commented in chapter seven of that novel that "Here was a man who made people laugh at the 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 the shambling, shuffling 'darkey' he impersonated on the stage" (Jasen 48). It was a quote that could well be applied to Williams, who was called by fellow Ziegfeld performer W. C. Fields "the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew" (Debus, His Final Releases). While often seen as a "natural" at what he did, ironically Williams in fact had to learn the dialect he mastered for his audience since his own background and diction placed him far from the Southern stereotype. …