"SAME AS YOU" [A brief biography of Bert Williams, Comedian)

by Ralph Allen for American Legacy Magazine. The Magazine of African-American History, Vol. 10, Number 4 (Winter 2005), pp.20-31

For a Little While, Bert Williams was America's Biggest Star. His journey is one of the forgotten triumphs of the twentieth century's struggle against racism..

So why is he forgotten by the general public? The answer lies partly in the evanescence of the theater. In the years before performers could be recorded on film or tape, the acts that dazzled live audiences vanished like Prospero's pageant into thin air.

Besides, Williams was black. Actually he was more white than black; the actor had grandmothers who were of mixed race and a paternal grandfather who was a white diplomat from Norway. However, by the standards of the day, even a drop of black blood determined one's destiny. If Williams gave Fields the impression that he was sad, it was racism that made him so.

Moreover, Williams was black af the wrong time-at least from the point of view of current black historians. He rose to prominence during the "coon song" era. The popular ballads of the period, when they dealt with Negro life at all, drew upon hateful minstrel caricatures of supposedly stupid or cunning plantation darkies.

Everyone wrote coon songs. Irving Berlin wrote them. So did Percy Wenrich and Albert von Tilzer. The most popular of all the coon songs was written by a black man, Ernest Hogan, the biggest Negro star of the period. Hogan, who billed himself as "the Un-bleached American," was held in high regard by black audiences, even though his 1896 hit, "All Coons Look Alike to Me," was denounced in the black press and spawned many pieces in the same vein by other black composers with titles like "Mammy's Little Pumpkin Colored Coons," "If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon," and "Plant a Watermelon on My Grave and Let the Juice Soak Through."

Not surprisingly, black historians and entertainers do not look back fondly on this period. And Williams seems tarred with the same brush as Hogan. He began his professional career in the only way possible during the last years of the nineteenth century---as a minstrel.

Egbert Austin Williams was born in the Bahamas in the early 1870s. His family moved to California when he was a child, and by the time he was in his teens he could play a banjo well enough to earn a living in San Francisco cafes. His light skin allowed him to get work with a Hawaiian singing troupe. He trained himself to speak black dialect ("Except on salary," said a contemporary, "he never said 'fust' for 'first.' "), and he met his future partner, George Walker, in 1893.

At first their act was similar to those of the white comedians who wore burnt cork. Billing themselves as "the Two Real Coons.,," they took whatever jobs were offered them and began working their way east. They appeared in small-time minstrel shows, in medicine shows, and in honky-tonks. Along the way they encountered all the difficulties that black men, performers or not, suffered in the 40 years after the Civil War. Once, their elegant offstage clothes so angered the white citizens of a little town that they were stripped, dressed in burlap, and given the boot. They endured every indignity and reached New York in 1896 as a specialty act in a Victor Herbert show, The GoldBug. It failed, but the following year they became vaudeville sensations, appearing for "36 consecutive weeks of what you may call velvet," Walker remembered, at the leading variety house of the day, Koster and Bial's.

Their act was typical minstrel stuff. Walker played a fast-talking dandy and acted as straight man for Williams, a slow-speaking Southern field hand, the easy dupe of his slicker partner. Walker was an expert dancer, and the climax of their act was a novelty number called the cakewalk, in which they were joined by two pretty black soubrettes Stella Wiley and Aida Reed Overton (who later married Walker).

When their vaudeville run ended, Williams and Walker appeared in a series of variety farces-that is, musical plays with plots loose enough to allow the stars to insert theie own speciality acts. One of these, In Dahomey, was a hit not only in New York but also in London. Indeed, Williams and Walker gave a command performance of the show before the King of England, and while on tour in Scotland, Williams was inducted into the Masons, an honor he would not have received in America, and one that he treasured above all others. In the 1906 show Abyssinia he introduced his most famous song, "Nobody." It became his signature piece, inserted by popular demand into everyone of his vaudeville acts and various editions of the Ziegfeld Follies. Alex Rogers, who wrote the lyrics, knew how to write a Bert Williams song better than any other hitsmith of the period. Earlier he---with Williams's help---had composed the music and lyrics of "I'm a Jonah Man," which won Williams seven encores when he first sang it in In Dahomey. At about the same time, Williams, who had studied pantomime in Europe with Pietro, the master of the art, introduced his silent one-act poker game, which he later revived in the Follies and included in one of his movie shorts, ANatural-Born Gambler (1916).

These songs and the pantomime marked the beginning of a change in Williams's style. Gradually he was putting behind him the "coon" caricatures of his minstrel days and presenting himself as a comically lugubrious Everyman, whose bad luck was the result not of racial misfortune but of the vicissitudes to which all of mankind is subject. No longer was he a bumpkin who got his laughs from illiterate malapropisms. Instead he was a weary citizen of the world, sardonic and stoical, the wry commentator on his own and others' tribulations.

Not that every vestige of the minstrel clown disappeared. Too light-skinned to be accepted as the "real coon" of his billing, Williams darkened his face with burnt cork to the very end of his career, a decision for which many contemporary blacks have never forgiven him.

Time has been kinder to George Walker. Of the two partners, Walker was darker of complexion and more militant in his defense of the rights of people of color. But the devious, fast talking dandy that he continued to portray was much more vulgar and demeaning than Williams's world-weary, bemused cynic.

In 1907 Walker fell ill. He struggled on until 1909, when he had to withdraw from the stage. He was suffering from paresis and died of it two years later. The end of the partnership presented Williams with both problems and opportunities. No longer able to rely on having a foil for his impersonation fa put-upon rural black, he had to find a solo persona for his vaudeville engagements.

Then came an offer that astounded the theatrical world. Florenz Ziegfeld invited Williams to join the 1910 edition of his Follies. This first appearance by a black star in mainstream white entertainment caused a sensation. Indeed, the cast threatened to boycott the production, but Ziegfeld held firm. Williams and another performer, Fanny Brice, were the hits of the 1910 show, and Williams went on to star in eight more Ziegfeld revues. In the Follies he found a new partner, Leon Errol, an Australian comedian who specialized in playing comic drunks. Two of their routines were considered classics.

In the 1911 edition of the Follies, Errol and Williams appeared in a sketch called "Upper and Lower." Errol was a wobbly British visitor who had overindulged; Williams, a redcap porter. The scene was topical: The final incarnation of Grand Central Terminal was under construction and the stage set showed a web of dangerous girders that represented the means of getting from its lower level to its upper. Because Errol is unsteady on his pins and in imminent danger of falling, Williams has attached a rope to his and Errol's waists, and they make their way like mountain climbers to the top of the building. Williams, of course, is loaded down with Errol's bag, and after the arduous climb, during which Errol has fallen several times and been hauled back up to a girder by Williams, Errol offers the porter his tip: a nickel. Williams looks at the coin and calmly unties the rope, letting Errol fall.

Williams in this sketch is no longer the innocent of his days with Walker; he's a crafty victim of fate who manages to get his own back. In the 1912 edition of the Follies, the most popular scene found Williams as the driver of a horsedrawn cab and Errol as his tipsy customer. The dilapidated horse crosses its legs in protest whenever a long journey is proposed. The cab, as the painted drop indicates, is on Seventh Avenue, and when Errol says he wants to go to Seventh Avenue, Williams says it's "a far way." The horse (played by two comedians) almost collapses, but Williams gets the nag going and then drives Errol around the stage in circles. One reviewer praised Williams's solemn demeanor and droll wit in the scene and reported that his performance "convulsed the audience."

In addition to such sketches, Williams was given a solo specialty spot in each of the Follies. In these turns he told stories and sang characteristic songs, all of them in his new persona as a wry observer of life's mischances. In his encore he always sang the signature tune that most. directly foreshadowed the new character he created for these mainstream white entertainments, "Nobody":

When life seems full of clouds and rain,

And I am filled with naught but pain,

Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain?

(Spoken: Nobody!)

When winter comes with snow and sleet,

And me with hunger and cold feet,

Who says, "Here's two-bits, go and eat"?

(Spoken: Nobody!)

But the singer is not whining, and in the chorus he determines to meet rebuff with rebuff.

I ain't never got nothin' from nobody,

no time:

And until I get somethin' from somebody,

some time,

I don't intend to do nothin' for nobody

no time.

Williams, the first successful black recording star, has left us two versions of "Nobody," one from 1906, when he was still Walker's partner, and one from 1913, after he had starred in three editions of the Follies.

The two recordings are very different. Williams sings the 1906 version in the key of C, and there is a plaintive quality to his voice, as if he is pleading for some sign of human generosity. By 1913 the rendition had become less sentimental; the singer accepts that the selfishness of others is all a man can expect in life. He clearly wants to make us laugh, not cry, at his plight, and his droll delivery is helped by lowering the key from C to B-flat. In both versions, he sings the song as a duet with a slide trombone that kads him into every phrase of the chorus.

This new character reflected Williams's developing sense of the nature of comedy. In a 1918 article in The American Magazine, he explained how he managed to get laughs from misfortune: "The sight of other people in trouble is nearly always funny. . . . If you will observe your own conduct whenever you see a friend falling down on the street you will find that. . . your first impulse is to laugh and your second is to run and help him get up. To be polite you will dust off his clothes and ask him if he has hurt himself. But when it is all over you cannot resist telling him how funny he looked when he was falling. The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh. . . ."

That last sentence succinctly describes the precise nature of Williams's humor in his Ziegfeld days. But the stoicism of the character that he portrayed in "Nobody," and in the many songs he sang that followed the same pattern, had no trace of self-pity. He was the detached observer of his own troubles, and that was the genius of the material. He succeeded in making his audience laugh, not cry. And, moreover, they were laughing with him, not at him.

Williams had no talent for singing in the conventional sense. His range was narrow, and since he wrote most of the melodies himself, he knew how to flatter his limited vocal abilities. His songs are essentially monologues, half talked, half sung, and---thanks to the artist in him---always understated.

"Nobody" is not a "coon" song. Williams was working to make his race an irrelevance. Such a strategy might have been possible in art, but in life it was a different matter. Star or not, he was subject to the same humiliations that all blacks suffered at this time, especially on tour: second-class hotels, exclusion from the better restaurants, isolation from most of the members of the company, a thousand affronts and rudenesses.

However, unlike Walker, he suffered in silence the various slights that came his way. When asked once whether he would have given anything to be white, Williams answered: "No. In truth, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient---in America."

The greatest inconvenience was reconciling the admiration he received from his white audience when he was on stage with their contempt when he wasn't. Williams was not a confronter. And continuing to wear his minstrel makeup, even when he stopped performing "coon" stereotypes, was a way of accommodating the expectations of his public.

But the clown mask of burnt cork was hot simply an adjustment to the prejudices of the audience. In an interview toward the end of his career, he talked about the liberating effect of his decision to wear black face. "One day at Moore's Wonderland in Detroit, just for a lark, I blacked up my face and tried the song '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. 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." His biographer Ann Charters glosses this passage as follows: "Not only was the black face clown immediately identifiable as a specific comic type, but Bert discovered he could use it to express his comic ideas. . . . Naturally reserved. . . at first he hid behind the. . . makeup; his tragedy was that the mask trapped him, for as the years went by, he could not remove the disguise."

In his Biograph one-reeler A Natural Born Gambler, the only one of his reputed seven films to survive, he is the sole member of a mostly black cast wearing the white lips and coal-black face of the minstrel clown. The contrast with his supporting players is at first incongruous. But Williams's comedy is so unexaggerated and effortless that his performance seems the most natural and unaffected of the entire company. The plot of the film is rudimentary. After he and his fellow players are arrested by a white sheriff for illegal gambling, Williams, alone in his prison cell, performs his famous one-man poker game---the masterpiece of pantomime that had become one of his signature turns in the Follies and vaudeville.

The secret of successful pantomime is economy, pruning gestures so strictly that each movement of hand or face communicates an immediately understandable action or emotion. Nothing superfluous can be allowed to distract or confuse the perfect simplicity of the message.

In his cell, Bert shuffles the imaginary cards with a big grin on his face, then deals five each to four players, three others and himself. He looks at his own cards and, not having a poker face, smiles contentedly. Clearly he has a promising hand. It is time to discard and draw. He deals two cards to the player on his right, three to the next player, but is alarmed when the fourth player stands pat. He takes one card himself and beams. He looks at his hand and bets one chip. Two of the men fold, but the fourth apparently raises by a surprisingly large amount. Williams fingers his imaginary chips, counting how many he has, and trying to decide whether the risk is worth it. Finally he pushes a large pile of chips into the pot. He shows his cards with the broad smile of a winner on his face. The smile turns to disappointment and then dismay as he sees the other player's hand.

There are no props or other actors in this scene, and yet the course of the game is perfectly clear, because of the transparent reactions of the solitary dealer.

His costume in the film is an old frock coat and a pair of perfectly fitting but slightly worn trousers. On the vaudeville stage he was both shabbier and more formal. Ashton Stevens, a Chicago drama critic, visited Williams backstage while he was appearing in The Broadway Brevities (1920). He described the great comedian's preparation for the performance: "He sat loose while. . . [his valet] rerobed him for his next appearancein ancient dress-suit and white cotton gloves and too small silk hat. . . .

"The coat of his disreputable dress-suit is green with age. The pants are black only where they have been patched; the chassis of them is in hue a stale heliotrope. When I first saw those heliotrope pants---and they were veterans then--- we had not been at war with Spain.

" 'Same pants, Brother Williams,' said I. . . .

"'Same,' he assented. . . . 'Same pants in which I appeared before the crowned heads of Europe.' "

Bert Williams had become what was known in the trade as a "tramp comic," with only his makeup reminding us of his race, even though the same makeup had hidden many a white countenance over the years.

As a tramp comic he needed to collect appropriately amusing stories, and like most comedians he kept a notebook in which he recorded jokes and anecdotes that might prove helpful when he was framing his vaudeville act. That notebook, in typescript, compiled with the help of his longtime collaborator, Alex Rogers, is now in the black history collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library system.

There is no date on the book, but internal evidence suggests that it was assembled over the whole range of his New York career. There are in it stories of the kind you might find in a minstrel show, and which would not be very useful to the solo Williams of his later years. And there are more sophisticated and rueful tales that perfectly fit his character in the Follies.

For example, this anecdote could easily be translated into crossfire stage dialogue.

A friend of mine went up to his boss and asked him if he could be excused from work on the following day.

"Certainly, Jake," said the boss. "What are you goin' to do?"

"I got to go to my wif's fun'al, boss, she died yistiddy. "

After the lapse of two weeks Jake goes to the boss again for a day off.

''Alright Jake, but what are you goin' to do this time?"

"I'm gwine tuh git married boss."

"What!! So soon? Why it's only been two weeks since you buried your other wife."

"I know boss; but you see I can't hol' spite long."

Williams's variety of humor is not driven by rapid fire punch lines. It is a comedy of character that requires Williams's melancholy stage personality for its effect.

In Simmons's Barber shop: Simmons say, to a gentman he wuz shavin' de yuther day, "Is I ever shave you befo'?"

De gentman say, "Yes, once." Simmons say, "I thought I 'membered yo' face."

De gentman say, "Yes, it's all healed up now."

When Simmons got thru shavin' de man, de man went over to de washstand and took an' put some water in his mouth an' commence rollin' it round in dare and kinder garglin' it up an' down an' puffin' his jaws out wid de water still in his mouth, so Simmons say, "Why, whut's de matter?" De man say, "Nuthin', only I jes want tuh see ef my face will hold water. Dat's all."

Williams's strategy was clear. The stories he used came from his experience as a black man in a white world. But they were presented in such a disarming and self-effacing manner that even his potential oppressors, mostly poor and working-class themselves, could see their own unlucky lives reflected in his.

Here is his most famous joke, in a version that the writer and lyricist David Campbell and I adapted for my Broadway musical Honky Tonk Nights. (Williams's version is a little more discursive.)

My Mama wanted me to work, but everyone knows there's no money in work, so I decided to be an actor and mingle with the crumbs and flakes of the upper crust. But it wasn't easy. In those days, pickings were slim for a man of my complexion.

I was almost ready to quit when I got my first big chance. I went to P. T. Barnum about a job in the circus.

"Young man," he said, "my lion just died. I've saved the skin, and I'll give you two dollars a week to wear that skin and take his place."

"Done," I said, and pretty soon, I was in a cage, pretending to be the King of the Beasts. I was roaring pretty good, when suddenly they pushed a big tiger into the cage with me. I started to shake. I whispered to the trainer. "What's that tiger doing here?"

He said, "This is a mixed animal act," and he slammed the door shut and locked it. Well, knew my time had come. Those fangs looked pretty sharp. So I crouched in the corner and began saying my prayers.

That tiger pounced on me. And just when I thought he was going to bite off my head, he whispered to me, "Don't be scared, pal. I'm colored, same as you."

This joke, sad and funny at the same time, seems to contradict the widely held opinion of most theorists of humor namely, that laughter is destroyed by sentiment. Take the philosopher and teacher Henri Bergson, for example. At about the time that Williams and Walker were appearing at Koster and Bial's, Bergson was giving a series of lectures in Paris that he subsequently published under the title An Essay on Laughter. In this treatise, which later became the bible of the French absurdist playwrights, Bergson writes: "Laughter has no greater foe than emotion. Its appeal is to the intelligence pure and simple."

If Bergson means that comedy loses its force when it becomes sentimental, he is right. If he means that humor is destroyed by feeling, he is wrong. Williams's stories were never maudlin, but he understood the ways in which low comedy could be enlarged without mawkishness to embrace all the moods of life.

In 1921 Williams told Ashton Stevens about a number he was developing for a new farce that was scheduled for the next season. He was to be the only star of this show, and the rest of the company was white-another significant breakthrough for the actor and for black entertainers generally. "I'm a porter in the hotel at Catalina Island," he said, "an awful liar but a character. And I've got a song coming along that ought to have character in it, too. I sing it with a dog; with a gangling-legged out-cast dog. A lady has given me a dollar to take this dog and feed him, and her husband has given me five dollars to take the dog and drown him. There ought to be some character in that song, not to say problem. I'm working it out---slow way I do everything, Brother Stevens. But I think I ought to be able to understand the way that old black porter feels. Yes," he added in a mellow melancholy bass, "and I think I ought to be able to understand how the dog feels too."

When Under the Bamboo Tree opened in Cincinnati, Williams got wonderful notices, particularly for his new song, "Puppy Dog." When the show reached Chicago a week later, the Tribune said that he was "as always, the very personification of comic woe."

In February it opened in Detroit, where a critic called "Puppy Dog" ". . . a plaintive little address. . . in which he finds himself as lonely as the dog. It is a gem of artful acting that inspires much laughter and that at the same time brings the listener close to tears."

Little did the reviewers know that Williams was very ill, but on February 28 he became too weak to continue. He returned to New York suffering from pneumonia and heart problems, made his will, and died on March 4, 1922. He was 46 years old.

There was a private family funeral, and at the public ceremony that followed more than 5,000 people passed by his coffin to pay their last respects. Among the mourners were several of his co-stars in the Follies. Eddie Cantor sent a floral arrangement. Leon Errol was one of the pallbearers. Ziegfeld, Nora Bayes, and the company of Shuffle Along (the pioneering black musical written by Eubie Blake and Noble SissIe) sent flowers.

My obsession with Bert Williams began when I discovered his joke book in the Schomburg Collection. I decided to write a musical--fictional, of course, but based on his life and career. That musical, Honky Tonk Nights (book and lyrics by David Campbell and me, music by Michael Valenti) reached Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre in the summer of 1986. To put it mildly, it did not run as long as I had hoped.

Perhaps we might have had greater success had I not departed in the sketches from the kind of humor for which Williams was known. Our hero, Barney Walker, the stand-in for Williams, had a comic style that did not resemble Bert's in any fundamental way. There was no trace of melancholy in the sketches I wrote for him. I made him the kind of raucous, over-the-top comedian that Mickey Rooney played in my earlier show Sugar Babies.

I had an actor, Joe Morton, who could have rendered perfectly Williams's rueful sense of endured misfortune, but I made the character angry and cheerful instead. I was convinced, you see, that Williams was not as sad as Fields had suggested. He was a quiet man who had no interest in the sporting life that eventually killed his partner. His niece wrote an affectionate and touching memoir of her Uncle Eggs, as she called him, that makes him appear to be essentially kind and happy. He apparently enjoyed the pleasures of private life in his Harlem mansion. And he was rich.

Now, of course, as Stanislavski points out, any portrayed emotion must come from some inner reservoir of feeling. And surely what he called the inconvenience of being a black man in America would have supplied Williams with the motivations he needed for "I'm a Jonah Man" and "Nobody." That said, he was not particularly unhappy.

In a song called "The Man of Many Parts," Campbell and I took on directly his wearing of blackface. We made our character angry and resentful that he had to make such a choice. Williams, on the other hand, was comfortable wearing the minstrel makeup. I know why I made the decision I did. For one thing, the clown whose comic mask hides a mournful, even tragic disposition, is a cliche of sentimental fiction. Still, I could have made a distinction between his life and his art and somehow paid tribute to the originality of his comic style. I wish I had it to do over again. But if there are no second acts in American life, there certainly aren't any in American show business.

So the story remains to be told. Bert Williams was one of the most significant figures in the history of the American theater. Our colorblind stage is partly his creation. And his mournful but unsentimental manner introduced a new tone into comedy.

Today he should be celebrated rather than blamed for the choices he was forced to make, and for transcending them.

W. E. B. Du Bois, who was no pushover in such matters, had this to say about Williams: "When in the calm afterday of thought and struggle to racial peace we look back to pay tribute to those who helped most, we shall single out for highest praise those who made the world laugh. . . above all, Bert Williams.

"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. This is the top of bravery; the finest thing in service."

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The late Ralph Allen, author of the long-running Tony-nominated musical Sugar Babies, wrote several other musicals, including Hanky Tonk Nights. Three currently available CDs feature Bert Williams: Bert Williams: The Middle Years, 1910-1918 (which includes "Nobody") and Bert Williams: His Final Releases, 1919-1922, both on Archeophone, andBert Williams: 1915-1921, on Document. In addition, his songs are featured on a rousing album by the historian and entertainer Max Morath, Jonah Man: A Tribute to Bert Williams (Vanguard).