Guest Post by Hank SmithBert Williams: Somebody

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I recently had an important experience in Minneapolis, which was working on a play called Nobody No Time, written by Carlyle Brown, a good friend from way back. The play is about Bert Williams and the title is in reference to the song Nobody, which he made popular and co-wrote with Alex Rogers. Since Carl knows of my background in mime and African-American performance history, he brought me out to Minneapolis to be the choreographer and dramaturge for the play, which he also directed. But who was Bert Williams, and why was this an important experience for me?

In the early 1970s, I became interested in studying mime, and then performing it. Even though I appreciated someone like Marcel Marceau and liked what he did, I had no interest in going to France to study because I felt more influenced by American vaudeville, and seeing folks on TV like Sid Caesar, Dick Van Dyke, Joan Davis, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball and others who were all adept at communicating very well with their bodies. In fact, the mime group I helped form, the Garden Variety Mime Theater, did all kinds of vaudeville-like stuff, and we often were not silent! At the time, a new generation of performers were doing what became known as "New Mime" and "New Vaudeville," but I did not know of many Black performers doing it, and I definitely was not aware of any historical Black performers of mime or pantomime (still not sure how different those terms are) until I found out about Bert Williams.

I had been doing a lot of research about early Black performers and knew a bit about Bert Williams and his partner of many years, George Walker. These were men who were part of an era of Black theater artists at the transition into the 20th century who were doing a lot to affect the American stage. People like Black Patti, Bob Cole, Will Marion Cook, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Reese Europe, and more, who came out of minstrelsy and the blackface tradition, begun by white male performers. But when I found out more about Williams, and particularly of his work with the Ziegfeld Follies after George Walker's death, I learned of his great skills in pantomime. Putting on a mask, whether it is clown makeup, white face mime, or blackface intrigued me in terms of what it could do for a person creatively. One doesn't necessarily hide behind a mask when performing, but rather is in a way liberated behind the mask to thrust a hidden part of his or her personality or observations of human behavior onto the stage. My understanding is that Bert Williams, a light-skinned man from the Bahamas, originally did not perform in blackface, but put it on one day and found that it unleashed his comic skills. The character he developed, as he called it, was an everyday man who always had things go wrong for him. He became the first Black star to be part of the Ziegfeld Follies, where he once played the father of white entertainer, Eddie Cantor, who later wrote that Williams was the best teacher he ever had in comedy. As a child, Buster Keaton even imitated him. Here was a role model for me, and I read what I could about him and even did a thesis on him and Stepin Fetchit (look him up!) for my NYU Master's degree.

Being able to help tell the story of this man on stage meant a lot to me. To do it with Carlyle, who is not only a playwright but also a performer who shares with me a love of the variety arts, particularly when Black folks are involved, was special. And it was being presented by Illusion Theater an independent theater company begun 50 years ago with the original name, Illusion Mime Theater, because its work was based on physical theater. In fact, one of its co-founders, Michael Robins, studied in Paris with Etienne Decroux! Their work on social issues has brought national acclaim, and Carlyle is one of the many playwrights they have supported.

For the longest time, the only footage available of Bert Williams that I was aware of were two 1916 short films, “A Natural Born Gambler” and “Fish.” “Gambler” is important because it includes Williams’ famous poker routine, and both films were to be followed by more starring him, but no more were made apparently because of concerns as to how many films with a Black star would go over in certain parts of the country.

But in 2014 I went to a screening at the Museum of Modern Art of recently discovered rare footage of him from a 1913 film called, "Lime Kiln Club Field Day." The film was never completed but contained a large predominately Black cast, which included members of J. Leubrie Hill's “Darktown Follies” stage company, and was shot in a studio in The Bronx and on location in New Jersey. 

Of the many things that struck me as I watched the film was a reaffirmation of how good and funny a silent film can be. The packed house was cracking up and the best humor was in the nuances of facial expression and body attitude, not in “over the top” slapstick. It was also refreshing to see Black folks just being people, finely dressed up and just living their lives. There was evidence of Black vernacular dance seen that was very familiar to me and a breadth of a whole world in images that evoked in me memories of stories my parents told me of growing up in the early 20th century (they being born in 1905 and 1906). Even with this, there were divides in who got to do what in the film. The female love interest was light-skinned and her suitors, other than Bert in makeup, were not too dark and with apparent "good hair". The darker-skinned women and men were more often exaggerated in their roles and movements and you could see some cast members were in blackface and some were not. But overall, I was sitting there spellbound. I was feeling all kinds of stuff in terms of my connection to a particular cultural/performance tradition, and to the art of film. 

George Walker, Bert Williams, Aida
Overton Walker (wife of George Walker)

What got me the most was at the end of the screening. The curtains closed on the screen and then the piano accompanist, Donald Sosin, who did a great job, stood up and raised his hands toward the curtained screen to lead the audience in enthusiastic applause that lasted for quite a while. Here, finally, was a full house giving Bert Williams his due as a film star, 100 years after the fact. One of the hosts of the evening said it is believed the film wasn't finished because Birth of A Nation had come out and created such a reaction that the filmmakers felt people weren't ready to see a film populated with a range of Black characters who are not all stereotyped. Yes, wearing blackface is a complicated issue and Williams was not always admired for doing it. He had wanted to do more dramatic roles without the makeup, but felt he would not be accepted. W.C. Fields supposedly said that Williams was the funniest man he ever saw, and the saddest. But one wonders what would have happened if Williams had had the film opportunities that someone like Charlie Chaplin had. As much as I admire Chaplin, Bert Williams would have given him a run for his money.

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• Hank's tap dance blog: https://storyoftap.blogspot.com/
• In 2023, I had the pleasure of spending two days interviewing Hank for the Oral History Project of the Program in Dance at New York's Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. The edited interview has yet to appear on their website, but here's where you can check for it, as well as check out some of the other interviews with great dance performers: https://www.nypl.org/research/divisions/jerome-robbins-dance-division/oral-history-project-dance

• If you keep scrolling down in the right column of this page, you will see links to other guest posts that have appeared here. I very much welcome guest posts so long as you have expertise in the topic, have something new or little-known to say, and are not merely publicizing yourself. But the best part is you get the same pay I get for doing this blog! If you're interested, just get in touch and we'll talk.