Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star [Hardcover]

Camille F. Forbes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 23, 2008

It is not hard to argue that every black performer in show business owes something to Bert Williams. Discovered in California in 1890 by a minstrel troupe manager, Williams swiftly became a regular player in the troupe. Traveling on from the rough-and-ready “medicine shows” that then dotted the West, he rose through the ranks of big-time vaudeville in New York City, and finally ascended to the previously all-white pinnacle of live-stage success: the fabled Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. Inspite of his triumphs-he brought the first musical with an all-black cast to Broadway in 1903-he was often viewed by the black community with more critical suspicion than admiration because of his controversial decision to perform in blackface. Modest, private, and conservative in his personal life, Williams left political activism and soapbox thumping to others. More than the simple narration of a remarkable life, Introducing Bert Williams offers a fascinating window into the fraught issues surrounding race and artistic expression in American culture. The story of Williams’s long and varied career is a whirlwind of inner turmoil, racial tension, glamour, and striving-nothing less than the birth of American show business.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Once billed as The Funniest Man on Earth, black comedian Bert Williams (1874–1922), in the midst of a current revival (e.g., Louis Chude-Sokei's The Last Darky and Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark), gets solidly covered by Forbes, a UC–San Diego professor of African-American literature and culture. She delivers an in-depth documentation of his life set against the shadowy backdrop of 19th and 20th-century racism. Working within the limitations of blackface stereotypes, Williams regaled audiences with his creative characterizations. Born in the Bahamas, he was schooled in California, joining medicine shows and minstrel troupes before teaming with George Walker for vaudeville and Victor recordings. Williams's woeful Nobody became his signature theme song, and in 1903, he brought the first black musical to Broadway. When Ziegfeld ignored protests and cast Williams in 1910, his integrated Ziegfeld Follies became a theatrical milestone. Williams had shown that blacks who break through to 'The Great White Way' can triumph and stay. Forbes's foray through the Billy Rose Theatre Collection and other archives fills 52 pages of bibliographic notes, and her vivid, detailed descriptions of Williams's comedy routines bring his dynamic stage presence to life on the page. (Jan. 29)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Camille F. Forbes, Ph.D., is a historian, critic, and performer and holds advanced degrees in both history and American civilization from Harvard University. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 16 and up
  
• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Basic Civitas Books; First edition (January 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465024793
• ISBN-13: 978-0465024797
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,296,867 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Camille Forbes's Brave Biography of Bert Williams, March 5, 2008

By 

Patricia Valiton - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star (Hardcover)

Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star

Camille Forbes's Brave Biography of Bert Williams

This big book is densely packed with information, yet so clearly organized and well written it is a delight to read. Framing her comprehensive overview of Bert Williams's career in the context of American theatre and race relations from the 1890s to the 1920s, Camille Forbes illustrates Williams's extraordinary talent and the challenges he faced as a black comedian. In a 400-page biography that is fully researched, meticulously documented, and refreshingly jargon-free, Professor Forbes provides a story that is as entertaining as it is scholarly. She is most effective in re-telling Williams's songs, jokes, monologues, skits, films, and musical productions - many of which had me alternately laughing out loud or crying, sometimes both.

In her Preface, Forbes explains that while her archival searches yielded rich details about Bert Williams's performances, she found little about the private life of this man who generally kept his own counsel. Promising to "remain loyal" to the facts she found (p. xii), she relies on detailed examinations of Bert Williams's public life, along with his scant remarks about himself and some comments by those who knew him, to explore the man behind the burnt cork. The result is that this biography sustains an organic integrity that an exposé of the private man's inner life would not. Forbes found plenty about Williams the performer to pack into her book, and just enough about Williams the man to flesh out his complexities. He was, for instance, a loyal husband and doting father but a careless chain smoker and a heavy drinker; a man who enjoyed socializing with other black men but was offended when black entertainers would drop by his dressing room uninvited; a man who dreamed of furthering "mutual understanding between the races" (p. 225) by developing a serious Negro character in a major production but failed to respond when "opportunity knocked" (pp. 224-226); a light-skinned Bahamian who identified with the African American community long before becoming a U.S. citizen but had by then alienated a large number of African Americans by remaining the only black in the all-white Ziegfeld Follies.

As with her promise to let her materials speak for themselves, Professor Forbes maintains an implicit contract to present them objectively, without becoming didactic or pedantic. Carefully tracing Williams's career, she provides extensive background information, examines the layers of meaning in his character portrayals, quotes conflicting reviews by critics both black and white, and addresses the complex racial issues of the time. Following Williams from his first public appearances as a shy teen-aged barker at a medicine show in Riverside, California, to his days performing in minstrel shows in San Francisco and his rise to national stardom with his partner, George Walker, Forbes describes Williams's comic routines in detail, placing them in historical and social context. Her depiction of the dynamics between the William's Jim Crow character and Walker's Zip Coon (pp. 60-62) is particularly compelling, as are her descriptions of the interactions between the two men and Williams's transition to a solo career after Walker's advanced syphilis forced him to retire.

When forced to go it alone, Bert Williams returned to vaudeville with great success, soon joining the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910. Forbes portrays Williams's need to separate his offstage presence as an intelligent man from his onstage comic characters during this transition, and she carefully documents the African American community's outrage as the highly-paid comedian continued to create his black-face minstrel characters amid the otherwise all-white shows. With the exception of a year off from the Follies in 1913, some off-season performances, and a few films, the black comic continued to play to audiences that were predominately, if not exclusively, white - even after he left Ziegfeld in 1918. Using Williams's own words when available, but refraining from speaking on his behalf, Forbes is consistently thorough in reporting the nuances of his character portrayals and the implications of the choices he made.

From the early 1900s, when Williams and Walker were already the "premier black act in New York" (p. 70), until after his death in 1922, Williams was generally considered the top black comedian in the U.S., if not "the funniest man on earth" (183). Throughout his career, even as Professor Forbes maintains a sure objectivity dictated by her materials and the history of U.S. race relations, she clearly cares deeply for Bert Williams and keeps him firmly in the spotlight. As a result, this brave biography takes on a life of its own.

A brief review cannot do justice to the biography's fullness, texture, and complexities, nor does it begin to echo the wonderful descriptions of Williams's comic performances. Look for the accounts of the recording of Williams's most popular song, "Nobody" (pp. 143-146) and his skits with Leon Errol in the 1911 and 1912 Follies (pp. 215-219 and 226-228). These were some of my favorites, but you may well find some you like even better.

For the record, I should note that I was working at UC San Diego when Professor Forbes began her career there, and I attended some of her talks based on her preliminary research for this book. I did not see the book's manuscript in preparation, however, nor have I yet attended one of her readings or read the reviews. My comments are based on my reading of the copy of the book I purchased after it was published.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A must read for anyone in the entertainment field, July 12, 2009

By 

Michael S. Breid (Eureka Springs, Arkansas United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star (Hardcover)

Anyone of any race who wishes to go into the entertainment field should read this book. The author,Camille Forbes has done her homework and done it well. Although it deals with the entertainment scene at the turn of the twentieth century the rules for survival in the "dog eat dog" world of show business still apply today. A fascinating account of Vaudeville's first black star(he was West Indian, not African-American) and the struggles and humiliations(Jim Crow) he had to endure it make it to the top. The book is thick(330+pages)but well worth the time spent reading it. Recommended.

4 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars how reliable?, February 16, 2008

By 

D. Culp "diarci" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star (Hardcover)

Before buying a book, I tend to look in the index and check accuracy by reading items that I already have some knowledge of. Like a reference to Bert Williams being passed over for the lead in the 1916 production of "Robinson Crusoe, Jr. in favor of a 19 year old white kid named Al Jolson.

In 1916, Jolson was 32 years old and had been a Broadway star - arguabley the biggest musical star n the country - for 5 years. If such an easily checked factoid can be overlooked, what hope is there for the accuracy of the remainder?