Bert Williams #1324
$ 10.00
Caption from poster__
“ I have never been able to
discover anything disgraceful
in being a colored man.
But I have often found
it inconvenient - in America.”
the preeminent
Black entertainer
of his era and one
of the most popular
comedians for all
audiences of his time.
He was by far the best-
selling black recording
artist before 1920.
W.C. Fields called Bert Williams
"the funniest man I ever saw,
and the saddest I ever knew."
Williams was an African-American vaudeville star in the early 1900s, and an influence on many future comedians, black and white. The customs of the times forced him to perform in blackface, playing a sad, luckless clown... but also a figure of wisdom. Comparisons to Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp are inevitable. As Elizabeth Yate McNamee reports, a small record company, Archeophone, has released a collection called Bert Williams: His Final Releases, 1919-1922. Williams had become wealthy and popular at the time of his death in 1922. But author Mel Watkins says Williams remained sad because of racial disparities. "He was a very intelligent man, who listened to operas, who read Nitzche," Watkins says. "He was basically a kind of elite individual... and had he been not black, he would have been accepted as such."
