Bert Williams

Bert Williams was born on November 12, 1874, in Nassau, The Bahamas, to Frederick Williams Jr. and his wife Julia. His family emigrated to the United States when he was two or three years old, and by 1880 they were recorded in the United States Federal Census as residents of New York City, with Bert listed as five years of age. He went on to become one of the most prominent entertainers of the vaudeville era and a central figure in the development of African-American entertainment on the Broadway stage, with a career spanning from 1900 to 1920.

By his late teens, Williams had made his way to California, where he joined West Coast minstrel shows. In 1893, performing with Martin and Selig's Mastodon Minstrels in San Francisco, he first encountered George Walker, who would become his long-term professional partner. The two developed an act built around song-and-dance numbers, comic dialogues, and humorous songs. Initially Williams played a scheming conniver while Walker portrayed the slow-witted victim, but they discovered stronger audience reactions by reversing those roles. Walker cultivated a persona as a strutting dandy, while Williams developed the character of a languorous, slow-talking figure beset by misfortune. Despite his stocky build, Williams was recognized for his command of physical comedy and body language, and a New York Times reviewer noted his ability to hold a facial expression for extended periods before drawing a laugh with the slightest movement.

In late 1896, Williams and Walker were added to the cast of The Gold Bug, a struggling musical that did not survive its run, though the pair earned favorable notices. They subsequently headlined Koster and Bial's vaudeville house for 36 weeks in 1896 and 1897, during which their energetic performances of the cakewalk helped popularize the dance. Williams also made his first recordings in 1896, though none is known to have survived. The duo performed in burnt-cork blackface, as was customary at the time, billing themselves as "Two Real Coons" to distinguish their act from white minstrel performers. Commentators have noted the layered irony in their presentation: Williams, who had a lighter complexion, wore a wig of kinky hair and applied burnt cork, while the pair simultaneously undermined racial stereotypes through their immaculate grooming and classy dress in publicity photographs, drawing a deliberate contrast between their offstage comportment and their onstage characters.

In 1899, Williams married Charlotte Thompson, known as Lottie, a singer with whom he had worked professionally. The ceremony was private, and the marriage lasted until his death. The couple had no biological children but adopted and raised three of Lottie's nieces and frequently sheltered orphans and foster children in their homes.

Williams and Walker appeared in a succession of productions, including A Senegambian Carnival, A Lucky Coon, and The Policy Players, the last of which is among Williams's verified Broadway credits. In August 1900, following a performance in New York City, the two parted ways after the show and Walker was pulled from a streetcar and beaten by a white mob during a riot that had erupted from racial tensions in the city. The following month, Williams and Walker opened Sons of Ham, a broad farce that moved away from extreme racial stereotypes then common in minstrelsy. The show ran for two years and is among Williams's Broadway credits. In 1901, the pair recorded thirteen discs for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Among those recordings, the financial lament "When It's All Going Out and Nothing Coming In" was race-neutral in its subject matter and became one of Williams's best-known songs. Another Williams composition, "Good Morning Carrie," was covered widely and became one of the biggest hits of 1901.

In September 1902, Williams and Walker debuted In Dahomey, a full-length musical written, directed, and performed by an all-Black cast. The production moved to New York City in 1903, with music by Will Marion Cook, book by Jesse A. Shipp, and lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and it became a landmark event as the first such musical staged at a major Broadway theater. One of its songs, "I'm a Jonah Man," helped establish the hard-luck persona that Williams would carry throughout much of his career.

Williams went on to appear in the Broadway musical Bandanna Land and in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, as well as the revue Broadway Brevities of 1920. He became the first Black performer to take a leading role on the Broadway stage, a distinction that placed him at the forefront of efforts to push back against racial barriers in American entertainment. In 1914, he appeared in the film Darktown Jubilee; Ebony described the work as the first attempt by an independent film company to star a Black actor in a movie and credited it with initiating a period in independent American cinema that explored Black themes for African-American audiences. Some sources have also credited actor Sam Lucas with a comparable distinction for the 1914 World Film Company production of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Before 1920, Williams was the best-selling Black recording artist in the United States. In 1918, the New York Dramatic Mirror described him as "one of the great comedians of the world." Fellow vaudevillian W. C. Fields, who appeared in productions alongside Williams, called him "the funniest man I ever saw—and the saddest man I ever knew." Williams died on March 4, 1922.