(Volume 1 in "The Complete Bert Williams" series, "The Ear...)
Volume 1 in "The Complete Bert Williams" series, "The Early Years, 1901-1909," compiles 31 of the inimitable comedian's recordings dating back as far as his landmark 1901 sessions, through to his 1906 sessions at which Williams waxed several of his trademark songs. It features the legendary recordings of Williams and Walker and two solos by Walker. The CD is accompanied by a stunningly beautiful 32-page full-color deluxe booklet with extensive notes on Bert Williams' early life and stage career up to 1909, extremely rare graphics, and an essay from 1906 on African Americans in the theatre by Williams' partner, George Walker.
(During the last three years of his life, legendary Africa...)
During the last three years of his life, legendary African-American vaudeville star Bert Williams made some of the most notable recordings of his career. Starting with "Oh! Lawdy" in 1919 and ending with "Not Lately"—a song recorded eight days before his death in 1922—these recordings range from Prohibition songs ("Ten Little Bottles," "The Moon Shines on the Moonshine"), to comic numbers ("Oh! Lawdy," "Eve Cost Adam Just One Bone," "You'll Never Need a Doctor No More,") to early so-called blues ("Unlucky Blues") and his parodies on hypocritical religious figures (the Elder Eatmore Sermons, "Save a Little Dram for Me").
Bert Williams: His Final Releases, 1919-1922 is the only commercial CD release that gives you all 24 of Bert Williams' final releases—complete, and in the order they were recorded. The package includes a 16-page booklet discussing the last three years of Williams' life, his stage career, and themes common in some of his later works.
Bert Williams was a Bahamian American entertainer, comedian and song writer.
Background
Bert Williams was born on November 12, 1874 on the island of New Providence, the Bahamas, the son of Frederick and Sarah Williams. His full name was Egbert Austin Williams. One of his grandfathers was white, but had married an octoroon, and Williams in his subsequent stage career always "blacked up" like a minstrel to appear sufficiently negroid. When he was a child his parents moved to the United States, and he spent his youth in California.
Education
In California he attended the Riverside High School.
Career
He joined a small minstrel troupe which toured the mining and lumber camps, and in 1895 he fell in with another of his race, George Walker, with whom he formed a vaudeville team.
For a year they drifted about the country, reaching New York in 1896. That year they were put into a musical piece at the Casino, as "filler, " and did so well that they were at once engaged at Koster and Bial's, where they performed many weeks, popularizing, among other songs, "Good morning, Carrie. " Their vaudeville success continued, till in 1903 they were able to produce a full-fledged musical comedy, In Dahomey, with music and words by members of their own race, in which all the players were negroes. This piece, thanks to its novelty, zest, and especially to Williams' fun-making, was a success on Broadway, and was taken to London (May 16, 1903, Shaftsbury Theatre), where its success was repeated; it ran eight months and a "command" performance was ordered at Buckingham Palace. Other similar pieces followed (such as Abyssinia, The Policy Players, and Bandanna Land) which made the composer, Will Marion Cook, scarcely less well known than the stars.
Walker died in 1909, and thereafter for some years Williams abandoned these all-negro productions and became the leading comedian in the Ziegfeld Follies, where his salary was in four figures, and where, not infrequently, his skits and songs, largely devised and written by himself, were the best part of the entertainment.
He was extremely popular with the public everywhere, and such songs as his "Jonah Man" were known far and wide. At this period David Belasco, sensing the potentialities Williams possessed for touching other than the comic stops, offered to star him, but the comedian decided he owed a debt of gratitude to Florenz Ziegfeld.
He finally left the Follies for two seasons (1919 and 1921) with the Broadway Brevities, and then entered a piece called Underneath the Bamboo Tree, with which he was performing when stricken with pneumonia in 1922.
Quotations:
"I have never been able to discover anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient - in America. "
"I named all my children after flowers. There's Lillie and Rose and my son, Artificial. "
"The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortune. "
Personality
Williams was over six feet tall, and weighed two hundred pounds. His color was light, and he had no particular negro accent off-stage. By nature he was modest, quiet, genuinely studious, and anything but shiftless. For the stage, he wore the burnt cork traditional with "black face" humor, assumed the most outrageously lazy linguistic peculiarities of his race, and was perpetually a stupid, melancholy victim of hard luck and a world too difficult for comprehension. The formula has been copiously overworked by his imitators (chiefly whites blacked-up). His songs were sung in a rich, lugubrious bass, with a minimum of gesture, but that minimum as wonderfully expressive as Charlie Chaplin's. It was, however, in the telling of certain stories, such as that of the cats who appeared to the preacher in his cabin, each one larger than the one before, and each remarking, after eating a coal from the fire, "We can't do nothin' till Martin comes, " that he disclosed an eerie quality of folk imagination which makes it regrettable that he never attempted to fulfil his often declared ambition - "To stop doing piffle, and interpret the real negro on the stage. "
Quotes from others about the person
In 1910, Booker T. Washington wrote of Williams: "He has done more for our race than I have. He has smiled his way into people's hearts; I have been obliged to fight my way. "
Connections
He was married in 1900 to Charlotte Williams, a colored player, who survived him.