• • A new book has just been published about this outstanding entertainer.
• • Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star
• • By Camille F. Forbes
• • [NY: Basic/ Civitas Books, 404 pages]
• • Michael Feingold's review for The Village Voice ["The Sad Funny Man: Rethinking the career of Bert Williams, who raised blackface to the level of an art form] begins like this:
• • Melancholy was his stock in trade. All his songs deal with misery, pain, and violence, usually visited on him. His primary activity in performance consisted of being lured from one hideous situation into a worse one. Onstage, his melancholy made audiences laugh immeasurably; offstage, a deeply inward soul, he carried it with him, retreating into his dressing room or his library at home to read philosophy and poetry. One of his dearest friends among the colleagues of his later career supplied the character matrix that everyone writing about him inevitably quotes: "[He] was the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew."
• • Michael Feingold continues: The sad funnyman's name was Bert Williams. That the colleague quoted above was W.C. Fields, whose own melancholy ran nearly as deep, says something not only about the sadness of great comic artists but also about America. Bert Williams (1874–1922) was black. For an African-American in that time of upheaval, he had a life that might have seemed to justify only joy. One of the most beloved public figures of his day, a star whose name and stock phrases were known to virtually everybody, in good years he earned an income substantially above that paid to any public official, including the president. Though not a crusader by temperament, he used his position to make many small breaches in the Jim Crow barriers behind which African-Americans were then trapped: He led the first black theater troupe to play in a Broadway house, and the first to give a royal command performance in England. He was the first black artist to become a recording star, and the first to play a leading role on Broadway on an equal footing with white artists. He is, unmistakably, a hero of our culture. ...
• • Clearly appreciating the showmanship of versatile Bert Williams — — if not the talents of his latest biographer Camillie Forbes — — book reviewer Michael Feingold adds: Yet he was both a hero and a great artist. That comes through clearly in Camille F. Forbes's ploddingly written but exhaustive new biography, Introducing Bert Williams. Forbes, an academic preoccupied with the social meanings she can read into Williams's career, gives only a hollowly theoretical sense of his life and achievements as an artist, and her sense of the era's theatrical culture is erratic at best, but the social questions she belabors are those with which Williams grappled, and she leaves no doubt that "realness" was indeed the driving passion behind his art. ...
• • Luckily for us, Michael Feingold points out, Bert Williams left his monument on disc: The immaculate timing and ripe musicality of his songs and spoken routines (available on a 3-CD set from Archeophone) make the optimal antidote for Forbes's muzzy prose.
• • Michael Feingold's complete review was published in The Village Voice.
— — Excerpt: — —
• • The Sad Funny Man: Rethinking the career of Bert Williams, who raised blackface to the level of an art form.
• • by Book Reviewer Michael Feingold
• • Published in: The Village Voice — — www.villagevoice.com
• • Published on: 12 February 2008
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