Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts included popular and classical musicians, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, female and male impersonators, acrobats, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and movies. Vaudeville developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary burlesque. Called "the heart of American show business," vaudeville was one of the most popular types of entertainment in North America for several decades.

Etymology

The origin of the term is obscure, but is often explained as being derived from the expression voix de ville, or "voice of the city." Another plausible etymology finds origins in the French Vau de Vire, a valley in Normandy noted for its style of satirical songs with topical themes. The term vaudeville, referring specifically to North American variety entertainment, came into common usage after 1871 with the formation of Sargent's Great Vaudeville Company of Louisville, Kentucky. It had little, if anything, to do with the Comédie en vaudeville of the French theatre.

Leavitt's and Sargent's shows differed little from the coarser material presented in earlier itinerant entertainments, although their use of the term to provide a veneer of respectability points to an early effort to cater variety amusements to the growing middle class. Though vaudeville had been used in the United States as early as the 1830s, most variety theatres adopted the term in the late 1880s and early 1890s for two reasons. First, seeking middle class patrons, they wished to distance themselves from the earlier rowdy, working-class variety halls. Second, the French or pseudo-French term lent an air of sophistication, and perhaps made the institution seem more consistent with the Progressive Era's interests in education and self-betterment. Some, however, preferred the earlier term "variety" to what manager Tony Pastor called its "sissy and Frenchified" successor. Thus, vaudeville was marketed as "variety" well into the twentieth century.

Beginnings

A descendant of variety, (c. 1860s–1881), vaudeville was distinguished from the earlier form by its mixed-gender audience, usually alcohol-free halls, and often slavish devotion to inculcating favor among members of the middle class. The form gradually evolved from the concert saloon and variety hall into its mature form throughout the 1870s and 1880s. This more genteel form was known as "Polite Vaudeville."

In the years before the American Civil War, entertainment existed on a different scale. Certainly, variety theatre existed before 1860 in Europe and elsewhere. In the United States, as early as the first decades of the 19th century, theatregoers could enjoy a performance consisting of Shakespeare plays, acrobatics, singing, dancing and comedy. As the years progressed, people seeking diversified amusement found an increasing number of ways to be entertained. A handful of circuses regularly toured the country; dime museums appealed to the curious; amusement parks, riverboats, and town halls often featured "cleaner" presentations of variety entertainment; and saloons, music halls and burlesque houses catered to those with a taste for the risqué. In the 1840s, minstrel shows, another type of variety performance, and "the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture," grew to enormous popularity and formed what Nick Tosches called "the heart of 19th-century show business." Medicine shows traveled the countryside offering programs of comedy, music, jugglers and other novelties along with displays of tonics, salves, and miracle elixirs, while "Wild West" shows provided romantic vistas of the disappearing frontier, complete with trick riding, music and drama. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in America's growing urban hubs.

In the early 1880s, impresario Tony Pastor, a circus ringmaster turned theatre manager, capitalized on middle class sensibilities and spending power when he began to feature "polite" variety programs in several of his New York City theatres. The usual date given for the "birth" of vaudeville is October 24, 1881, when Pastor famously staged the first bill of self-proclaimed "clean" vaudeville in New York City. Hoping to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic uptown, Pastor barred the sale of liquor in his theatres, eliminated bawdy material from his shows, and offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees. Pastor's experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit.

Popularity

{| class="infobox" style="font-size: 90%; width: 25%;" | The manager's comments, sent back to the circuit's central office weekly, follow each act's description. The bill illustrates the typical pattern of opening the show with a "dumb" act to allow patrons to find their seats, placing strong acts in second and penultimate positions, and leaving the weakest act for the end, to clear the house.

As well, note that in this bill, as in many vaudeville shows, acts often associated with "lowbrow" or popular entertainment (acrobats, a trained mule) shared a stage with acts more usually regarded as "highbrow" or classical entertainment (opera vocalists, classical musicians). |- |

(1) Burt Jordan and Rosa Crouch. "Sensational, grotesque and 'buck' dancers. A good act..."

(2) The White Tscherkess Trio. "A man and two women who do a singing turn of the operatic order. They carry special scenery which is very artistic and their costumes are original and neat. Their voices are good and blend exceedingly well. The act goes big with the audience."

(3) Sarah Midgely and Gertie Carlisle. "Presenting the sketch 'After School.' ... they are a 'knockout.'"

(4) Theodor F. Smith and Jenny St. George-Fuller. "Refined instrumentalists."

(5) Milly Capell. "European equestrienne. This is her second week. On account of the very pretty picture that she makes she goes as strong as she did last week."

(6) R. J. Jose. "Tenor singer. The very best of them all."

(7) The Nelson Family of Acrobats. "This act is composed of three men, two young women, three boys and two small girls. The greatest acrobatic act extant."

(8) James Thornton. "Monologist and vocalist. He goes like a cyclone. It is a case of continuous laughter from his entrance to his exit."

(9) Burk and Andrus and Their Trained Mule. "This act, if it can be so classed, was closed after the evening performance."

|} B.F. Keith took the next step, starting in Boston, where he built an empire of theatres and brought vaudeville to the United States and Canada. Later, E.F. Albee, adoptive grandfather of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, managed the chain to its greatest success. Circuits such as those managed by Keith-Albee provided vaudeville's greatest economic innovation and the principal source of its industrial strength. They enabled a chain of allied vaudeville houses that remedied the chaos of the single-theatre booking system by contracting acts for regional and national tours. These could easily be lengthened from a few weeks to two years.

Albee also gave national prominence to vaudeville's trumpeting "polite" entertainment, a commitment to entertainment equally inoffensive to men, women and children. Acts that violated this ethos (e.g., those that used words such as "hell") were admonished and threatened with expulsion from the week's remaining performances or were canceled altogether. In spite of such threats, performers routinely flouted this censorship, often to the delight of the very audience members whose sensibilities were supposedly endangered.

By the late 1890s, vaudeville had large circuits, houses (small and large) in almost every sizable location, standardized booking, broad pools of skilled acts, and a loyal national following. One of the biggest circuits was Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit. It incorporated in 1919 and brought together 45 vaudeville theaters in 36 cities throughout the United States and Canada and a large interest in two vaudeville circuits. Another major circuit was that of Alexander Pantages. At his hey-day Pantages owned more than 30 vaudeville theaters and controlled, through management contracts, perhaps 60 more in both the United States and Canada.

At its height, vaudeville played across multiple strata of economic class and auditorium size. On the Vaudeville circuit, it was said that if an act would succeed in Peoria, Illinois, it would work anywhere. The question "Will it play in Peoria?" has now become a metaphor for whether something appeals to the American mainstream public. The three most common levels were the “small time” (lower-paying contracts for more frequent performances in rougher, often converted theatres), the “medium time” (moderate wages for two performances each day in purpose-built theatres), and the “big time” (possible remuneration of several thousand dollars per week in large, urban theatres largely patronized by the middle and upper-middle classes). As performers rose in renown and established regional and national followings, they worked their way into the less arduous working conditions and better pay of the big time. The capitol of the big time was New York City's Palace Theatre (or just “The Palace” in the slang of vaudevillians), built by Martin Beck in 1913 and operated by Keith. Featuring a bill stocked with inventive novelty acts, national celebrities, and acknowledged masters of vaudeville performance (such as comedian and trick roper Will Rogers), the Palace provided what many vaudevillians considered the apotheoses of remarkable careers.

While the neighborhood character of vaudeville attendance had always promoted a tendency to tailor fare to specific audiences, mature vaudeville grew to feature houses and circuits specifically aimed at certain demographic groups. African-American patrons, often segregated into the rear of the second gallery in white-oriented theatres, had their own smaller circuits, as did speakers of Italian and Yiddish. (For a brief discussion of Black vaudeville, see Theater Owners Booking Association.) White-oriented regional circuits, such as New England's "Peanut Circuit", also provided essential training grounds for new artists while allowing established acts to experiment with and polish new material. At its height, vaudeville was rivaled only by churches and public schools among the nation's premiere public gathering places.

Decline

The shift of New York City's Palace Theatre, vaudeville's epicenter, to an exclusively cinema presentation on 16 November 1932 is often considered to have been the death knell of vaudeville. Yet no single event is more than reflective of its gradual withering. The line is blurred further by the number of vaudeville entrepreneurs who made more or less successful forays into the movie business. For example, Alexander Pantages quickly realized the importance of motion pictures as a form of entertainment. He incorporated them in his shows as early as 1902. Later, he entered into partnership with the motion picture distributor Famous Players, a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. There was no abrupt end to vaudeville, though the form was clearly staggering by the late 1920s.

The continued growth of the lower-priced cinema in the early 1910s dealt the heaviest blow to vaudeville. This was similar to the advent of free broadcast television's diminishing the cultural and economic strength of the cinema. Cinema was first regularly commercially presented in the United States in vaudeville halls; the first public showing of movies projected on a screen took place at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in 1896. Lured by greater salaries and less arduous working conditions, many early film and old-time radio performers, such as Al Jolson, W. C. Fields, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, Edgar Bergen, Fanny Brice, and Eddie Cantor, used the prominence gained in live variety performance to vault into new media. (In so doing, such performers often exhausted in a few moments of screen time the novelty of an act that might have kept them on tour for several years.) Other performers, who entered in vaudeville's later years, including Jack Benny, Kate Smith, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Judy Garland, Rose Marie, Sammy Davis, Jr., Red Skelton, Burns and Allen, and the Three Stooges, used vaudeville only as a launching pad for later careers. They left live performance before achieving the national celebrity of earlier vaudeville stars, but found fame in new venues.

By the late 1920s, almost no vaudeville bill failed to include a healthy selection of cinema. Earlier in the century, many vaudevillians, cognizant of the threat represented by cinema, held out hope that the silent nature of the "flickering shadow sweethearts" would preclude their usurpation of the paramount place in the public's affection. With the introduction of talking pictures in 1926, however, the burgeoning film studios removed what had remained, for many, the chief point in favor of live theatrical performance: spoken dialogue. Historian John Kenrick wrote: "Top vaudeville stars filmed their acts for one-time pay-offs, inadvertently helping to speed the death of vaudeville. After all, when "small time" theatres could offer "big time" performers on screen at a nickel a seat, who could ask audiences to pay higher amounts for less impressive live talent? The newly-formed RKO studios took over the famed Orpheum vaudeville circuit and swiftly turned it into a chain of fulltime movie theaters. The half-century tradition of vaudeville was effectively wiped out within less than four years."

Inevitably, managers further trimmed costs by eliminating the last of the live performances. Vaudeville also suffered due to the rise of broadcast radio following the greater availability of inexpensive receiver sets later in the decade. Even the hardiest within the vaudeville industry realized the form was in decline; the perceptive understood the condition to be terminal. The standardized film distribution and talking pictures of the 1930s confirmed the end of vaudeville. By 1930, the vast majority of formerly live theatres had been wired for sound, and none of the major studios were producing silent pictures. For a time, the most luxurious theatres continued to offer live entertainment, but the majority of theatres were forced by the Great Depression to economize.

Some in the industry blamed cinema's drain of talent from the vaudeville circuits for the medium's demise. Others argued that vaudeville had allowed its performances to become too familiar to its famously loyal, now seemingly fickle audiences.

Though talk of its resurrection was heard throughout the 1930s and after, the demise of the supporting apparatus of the circuits and the inescapably higher cost of live performance made any large-scale renewal of vaudeville unrealistic.

Architecture

The most striking examples of Gilded Age theater architecture were commissioned by the big time vaudeville magnates and stood as monuments of their wealth and ambition. Examples of such architecture are the theaters built by impressario Alexander Pantages. Pantages often used architect B. Marcus Priteca (1881–1971), who in turn regularly worked with muralist Anthony Heinsbergen. Priteca devised an exotic, neo-classical style that his employer called "Pantages Greek".

Though classic vaudeville reached a zenith of capitalization and sophistication in urban areas dominated by national chains and commodious theatres, small-time vaudeville included countless more intimate and locally controlled houses. Small-time houses were often converted saloons, rough-hewn theatres or multi-purpose halls, together catering to a wide range of clientèle. Many small towns had purpose-built theatres.

Post-vaudeville

), once called "the cleverest buckdancer on the vaudeville stage;" he later became a bandleader and ended his days as a bank teller.]] Some of the most prominent vaudevillians continued the migration to cinema, though others found that the gifts that had so delighted live audiences did not translate well into different media. Some performers such as Bert Lahr fashioned careers out of combining live performance, radio and film roles. Many others later appeared in the Catskill resorts that constituted the "Borscht Belt". Many simply retired from performance and entered the workaday world of the middle class, the group that vaudeville, more than anything else, had helped to articulate and entertain.

Yet vaudeville, both in its methods and ruling aesthetic, influenced the succeeding media of film, radio and television. The screwball comedies of the 1930s, those reflections of the brief moment of cinematic equipoise between dialogue and physicality, reflect the more madcap comedic elements of some vaudeville acts (e.g., The Three Keatons). In form, the television variety show owed much to vaudeville. The multi-act format had renewed success in shows such as Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and, of course, The Ed Sullivan Show. Today, performers such as Bill Irwin, a MacArthur Fellow and Tony Award-winning actor, are frequently lauded as being "New Vaudevillians."

References to vaudeville and the use of its distinctive argot continue throughout Western popular culture. Terms such as "a flop" (an act that does badly), for example, have entered the American idiom. Many of the most common performance techniques and "gags" of vaudeville entertainers are still seen on television and on film. Vaudeville, like its dime museum and variety theatre forebears, also continued and solidified a strong American absorption with foreign entertainers.

Archives

The American Vaudeville Museum, the world’s largest collection of vaudeville memorabilia, is located at the University of Arizona.

The Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres in Toronto houses the world's largest collection of vaudeville props and scenery.

See also

Blackface

Borscht Belt

Burlesque

Cabaret

Chautauqua

Concert saloon

For Me and My Gal (film)

Medicine show

Minstrel show

Music hall

Nightclub

Revue

Tab show

Tom Shows

Concert Party (entertainment)

References

External links

Vaudeville Ventriloquists

Virtual Vaudeville

Glossary of Vaudeville Slang

University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – J. Willis Sayre Photographs

University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – Prior and Norris Troupe Photographs

University of Washington libraries Digital Collections - 19th Century Actors Photographs

University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections - Keith/Albee Vaudeville Theater Collection

Ruckus! American Entertainments at the Turn of the Twentieth Century From the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University

Hear Gary Stephens on vaudeville, ICA 1988

* Category:American culture Category:Canadian culture Category:Comedy Category:Entertainment in the United States Category:Theatrical genres Category:Variety entertainment Category:French loanwords

Name	DOOM
Background	solo_singer
Alias	Doom, King Geedorah, Metal Face, Metal Fingers, Viktor Vaughn, Zev Love X
Born	January 9, 1971 London, United Kingdom
Born as	Daniel Dumile
Origin	Manhattan, New York City, New York, U.S.
Genre	East Coast hip hop
Instrument	Vocals, sampler, synthesizer, drum machine, Pro Tools
Occupation	Rapper, hip hop producer
Associated acts	Danger Doom, Ghostface Killah, J Dilla, KMD, Madvillain, MF Grimm
Years active	1988–19931997–present
Label	Elektra (1988–1993)Sub Verse (1997–2003)Fondle 'Em (1997–2001)Metal Face (1997–present) Big Dada (2003–present)Naturesounds (2003–present) Rhymesayers (2003–present)Stones Throw (2004–present)Lex (2005–present)
Url	Official website

Daniel Dumile (pronounced , ) is an American hip hop artist who has taken on several stage names in his career, most notably MF Doom, where the "MF" stands for Metal Face or Metal Fingers. He has appeared in several collaborative projects such as Danger Doom (with Danger Mouse) and Madvillain (with Madlib).

History

Early years with KMD

Dumile was born on January 9, 1971 in London, England, the son of a Trinidadian mother and Zimbabwean father. He then moved with his family to New York and was raised in the city of Long Beach, New York on Long Island.

As Zev Love X, he formed the group KMD in 1988 with his younger brother DJ Subroc and another MC called Onyx the Birthstone Kid.

Dumile and KMD's recorded debut came on 3rd Bass's song "The Gas Face" from The Cactus Album," In the late 1990s, he left New York City and settled in Atlanta. According to interviews with Doom, he was also "recovering from his wounds" and swearing revenge "against the industry that so badly deformed him.

In 2002, he appeared on the Sound-Ink's Colapsus collection,on a very hard to find track titled "Monday Nite at Fluid" featuring Kurious with production by King Honey, who also produced some tracks for Dumile's album Vaudeville Villain.

With few exceptions Dumile produces the instrumentation tracks for his solo releases.

Ongoing career

In 2003, Dumile released the King Geedorah album Take Me to Your Leader. Geedorah is credited as producer, but only appears as an MC on four tracks. The majority of vocal tracks feature guest MCs, and the album features several instrumental montages of sampled vocals from old movies and TV shows—a technique employed on most of Dumile's albums. Both Venomous Villain and Take Me to Your Leader feature appearances by MF Doom.

Also in 2003, Dumile released the LP Vaudeville Villain under the moniker Viktor Vaughn (another play on Doctor Doom, whose "real name" is Victor von Doom). In 2004 he released a follow-up LP, Venomous Villain (also called VV2).

And, in 2004, the second MF Doom album MM.. Food was released by the Minnesota-based label Rhymesayers Entertainment.

Mainstream recognition

Doom's first commercial breakthrough came in 2004, with the album Madvillainy, created with producer Madlib under the group name Madvillain. Released by Stones Throw Records, the album was a critical and commercial success. MF Doom was seen by mainstream audiences for the first time as Madvillain received publicity and acclaim in publications such as Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Spin. A video for "All Caps" and a four-date U.S. tour followed the release of Madvillainy. Additional videos for "Rhinestone Cowboy" and "Accordion", both directed by Andrew Gura, were released on the DVDs Stones Throw 101 and Stones Throw 102: In Living the True Gods, respectively.

Though still an independent artist, MF Doom took a bigger step towards the mainstream in 2005 with The Mouse and the Mask, a collaboration with producer DJ Danger Mouse under the group name Danger Doom. The album, released on October 11, 2005 by Epitaph, was done in cooperation with Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and featured voice-actors and characters from its programs (mostly Aqua Teen Hunger Force). Danger Doom reached #41 on the Billboard 200. In 2006 Doom hosted the Adult Swim Christmas special and he could be seen in between shows, usually talking about what was up next, and making jokes. Doom also made an appearance in "November Has Come", a track on Gorillaz's 2005 album Demon Days, which reached #6 on the Billboard 200.

2006-2009

MF Doom produced tracks for both of Ghostface Killah's 2006 albums Fishscale and More Fish, and the two are currently at work on a collaboration album titled Swift & Changeable. So far only one track has been released from the album, "Angels", which appeared on a Nature Sounds compilation in late 2006, and later re-released in a different fashion on Doom's 2009 album Born Like This. Doom has also revealed plans for a second Madvillain album with producer Madlib, with one song, "Monkey Suite", first appearing on the Adult Swim/Stones Throw Records album Chrome Children, later it appeared on Madvillainy 2 - The Madlib Remix. Other potential projects mentioned by Doom include new albums from Danger Doom, KMD, as well as further albums under both his Viktor Vaughn and King Geedorah aliases. However, many such Doom projects have been rumored in recent years without materializing.

Despite no new Doom releases in 2006, Kidrobot and Stones Throw released an 8" tall Madvillain toy available to coincide with the release of the Chrome Children CD/DVD (hosted by Peanut Butter Wolf) which featured a DVD performance of Madvillain and several other Stones Throw artists. MF Doom also continued to work with Adult Swim doing voice-over work as Sherman the Giraffe on Perfect Hair Forever, being the voice for The Boondocks ads and previews and hosting their Christmas Eve 2006 programming.

In late January 2009, Lex records confirmed Doom's new album title to be Born Like This, and that the "MF" would be dropped from his name, now just Doom. The album was released worldwide on March 24, 2009. As a teaser, the track "Ballskin" was posted on Doom's Myspace page on January 13, 2009. Snippets of the entire album were made available for streaming on Doom's Myspace on the album's release date. The title for the album was inspired by the poem "Dinosauria, We" by 1970s and 1980s poet Charles Bukowski. Doom samples a performance of the poem by Bukowski on the track "Cellz". Previously, Doom used a Bukowski sample for a vocal interlude on 2004's "All Outta Ale." Thom Yorke of Radiohead remixed the track "Gazillion Ear". which is available as an iTunes-only bonus track. June 26, 2009 Kurious released II which featured Doom on the song "Benetton".

Upcoming projects

On May 26, 2010, the second single for the next Madvillain album "Paper Mill" was released through Adult Swim. Expektoration, a live Doom album, was released on September 14, 2010 through Gold Dust Media. In mid 2010, Doom released the mix-tape "Doom!", a collection of greatest hits, B-sides and rareties, including the theme for the video game featuring Ghostface Killah, and Biochemical Equation, featuring the RZA.

On August 26, 2010, Nature Sounds addressed the long delayed Swift & Changeable album with the statement: "Doom is still working on the album and Ghost has recently gone back to do a few new songs too. So far all the production is by Doom. Really its up to Doom & Ghost to decide when the album is done... not us. we want it out as quickly as [the fans] do."

Discography

1999:

2004: MM..Food

2005: Live from Planet X

2009: Born Like This

2009: Unexpected Guests

2010: Gazzillion Ear EP

2010: Expektoration

; as Viktor Vaughn

2003: Vaudeville Villain

2004: Venomous Villain

; as King Geedorah

2003: Take Me to Your Leader

Collaboration albums

Madvillain (with Madlib)

2004: Madvillainy

2008: Madvillainy 2 - The Madlib Remix

Danger Doom (with Danger Mouse)

2005: The Mouse and The Mask

2005: Be Afraid, be very Afraid (EP)

2006: Occult Hymn

Sniperlite (aka Dilla Ghost Doom) (with J Dilla and Ghostface Killah)

2008: Sniperlite

Instrumental collections

; as The SuperVillain

2004: Special Blends Volume 1 & 2

; as Metal Fingers

2001: Special Herbs, Vol. 1

2002: Special Herbs, Vol. 2

2003: Special Herbs, Vol. 3

2003: Special Herbs, Vol. 4

2003: Special Herbs, Vols. 4, 5 & 6

2004: Special Herbs, Vols. 5 & 6

2004: Special Herbs, Vols. 7 & 8

2005: Special Herbs, Vols. 9 & 0

2006:

References

External links

Category:1971 births Category:African American rappers Category:American voice actors Category:American people of Trinidad and Tobago descent Category:People from London Category:British people of Zimbabwean descent Category:British people of Trinidad and Tobago descent Category:Rhymesayers Entertainment Category:Rappers from Long Island Category:Members of the Nation of Gods and Earths Category:American hip hop record producers Category:English rappers Category:British rappers Category:British expatriates in the United States Category:Underground rappers Category:Living people Category:Black British musicians Category:Rapping Category:Underground hip hop

Name	Eddie Cantor
Birth name	Edward Israel Iskowitz
Birth date	January 31, 1892
Birth place	New York City, New York, U.S.
Death date	October 10, 1964
Death place	Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actor, comedian, dancer, singer-songwriter
Years active	1907–1953
Spouse	Ida Cantor (1914-1962) 5 daughters}}

Eddie Cantor (January 31, 1892 – October 10, 1964) was an American "illustrated song" performer, comedian, dancer, singer, actor and songwriter. Familiar to Broadway, radio, movie and early television audiences, this "Apostle of Pep" was regarded almost as a family member by millions because his top-rated radio shows revealed intimate stories and amusing anecdotes about his wife Ida and five daughters. Some of his hits include "Makin' Whoopee", "Ida", "If You Knew Susie", "MA! He's Makin' Eyes at Me", "Margie" and "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree?)" He also wrote a few songs, including "Merrily We Roll Along", the Merry Melodies Warner Bros. cartoon theme.

His eye-rolling song-and-dance routines eventually led to his nickname, "Banjo Eyes". In 1933, the artist Frederick J. Garner caricatured Cantor with large round eyes resembling the drum-like pot of a banjo. Cantor's eyes became his trademark, often exaggerated in illustrations, and leading to his appearance on Broadway in the musical Banjo Eyes (1941).

His charity and humanitarian work was extensive, and he is credited with coining the phrase and helping to develop The March of Dimes.

Biography

Cantor was born Edward Israel Iskowitz in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Meta and Mechel Iskowitz. His mother died in childbirth one year after his birth, and his father died of pneumonia when Eddie was two, leaving him to be raised by his beloved grandmother, Esther Kantrowitz. As a child, he attended Surprise Lake Camp. A misunderstanding when signing her grandson for school gave him her last name of Kantrowitz (shortened by the clerk to Kanter). Esther died on January 29, 1917, two days before he signed a long-term contract with Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. to appear in his Follies.

He had adopted the first name "Eddie" when he met his future wife Ida Tobias in 1903, because she felt that "Izzy" wasn't the right name for an actor. Cantor married Ida in 1914. They (famously) had five daughters, Marjorie, Natalie, Edna, Marilyn and Janet, who provided comic fodder for Cantor's longtime running gag, especially on radio, about his five unmarriageable daughters. Several radio historians, including Gerald Nachman (Raised on Radio), have said that this gag did not always sit well with the girls.

He was the second president of the Screen Actors Guild, serving from 1933-1935. He invented the title "The March of Dimes" for the donation campaigns of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was organized to combat polio. It was a play on the March of Time newsreels popular at the time. He began the first campaign on his own radio show in January 1938, asking people to mail a dime to the nation's most famous polio victim, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Other entertainers joined in the appeal via their own shows, and the White House mail room was deluged with 2,680,000 dimes.

Following the death of daughter Marjorie at the age of 44, both Eddie's and Ida's health declined rapidly. Ida died in August 1962 of "cardiac insufficiency". On October 10, 1964 in Beverly Hills, California, Eddie Cantor suffered another heart attack and died, aged 72. He is buried in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery. Cantor was awarded an honorary Academy Award the year of his death, for distinguished service to the film industry.

Stage

Saloon songs to vaudeville

By his early teens Cantor began winning talent contests at local theaters and started appearing on stage. One of his earliest paying jobs was doubling as a waiter and performer, singing for tips at Carey Walsh's Coney Island saloon, where a young Jimmy Durante accompanied him on piano. He made his first public appearance in Vaudeville in 1907 at New York's Clinton Music Hall. In 1912, he was the only performer over the age of 20 to appear in Gus Edwards's Kid Kabaret, where he created his first blackface character, "Jefferson". He later toured with Lila Lee as the team "Cantor & Lee". Critical praise from that show got the attention of Broadway's top producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, who gave Cantor a spot in the Ziegfeld rooftop post-show, Midnight Frolic (1917). a period considered the best years of the long-running revue. For several years Cantor co-starred in an act with pioneer African-American comedian Bert Williams, both appearing in blackface; Cantor played Williams's fresh-talking son. Other co-stars with Cantor during his time in the Follies included Will Rogers, Marilyn Miller, and W.C. Fields. He moved on to stardom in book musicals, starting with Kid Boots (1923), Whoopee! (1928) and Banjo Eyes (1941).

Cantor's appearance with Rudy Vallee on Vallee's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour on February 5, 1931 led to a four-week tryout with NBC's The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Replacing Maurice Chevalier, who was returning to Paris, Cantor joined Chase and Sanborn on September 13, 1931. This hour-long Sunday evening variety series teamed Cantor with announcer Jimmy Wallington and violinist Dave Rubinoff. The show established Cantor as a leading comedian, and his scriptwriter, David Freedman, as “the Captain of Comedy.” Cantor soon became the world's highest-paid radio star. His shows began with a crowd chanting, "We want Can-tor, We want Can-tor," a phrase said to have originated when a vaudeville audience chanted to chase off an opening act on the bill before Cantor. Cantor's theme song was his own lyric to the Leo Robin/Richard Whiting song, "One Hour with You." His radio sidekicks included Bert Gordon, (comic Barney Gorodetsky, aka "The Mad Russian") and Harry Parke (better known as "Parkyakarkus"). Cantor also discovered and helped guide the career of singer Dinah Shore, first featuring her on his radio show in 1940, as well as other performers, including Deanna Durbin, Bobby Breen and Eddie Fisher.

Indicative of his effect on the mass audience, he agreed in November 1934 to introduce a new song by the songwriters J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie that other well-known artists had rejected as being "silly" and "childish." The song, "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", immediately had orders for 100,000 copies of sheet music the next day. It sold 400,000 copies by Christmas of that year.

Time to Smile

His NBC radio show, Time to Smile, was broadcast from 1940 to 1946, followed by his Pabst Blue Ribbon Show from 1946 through 1949. He also served as emcee of The $64 Question during 1949-'50, and hosted a weekly disc jockey program for Philip Morris during the 1952-'53 season. In addition to film and radio, Cantor recorded for Hit of the Week Records, then again for Columbia, for Banner and Decca and various small labels.

His heavy political involvement began early in his career, including his participation in the strike to form Actors Equity in 1919, provoking the anger of father figure and producer, Florenz Ziegfeld. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Cantor publicly denounced Father Charles Coughlin and was dropped by his sponsor, Camel cigarettes. A year and a half later, it was his friend Jack Benny who was able to get him back on the air.

Recordings

Cantor began making phonograph records in 1917, recording both comedy songs and routines and popular songs of the day, first for Victor, then for Aeoleon-Vocalion, Pathé and Emerson. From 1921 through 1925 he had an exclusive contract with Columbia Records, returning to Victor for the remainder of the decade.

Cantor was one of the era's most successful entertainers, but the 1929 stock market crash took away his multi-millionaire status and left him deeply in debt. However, Cantor's relentless attention to his own earnings in order to avoid the poverty he knew growing up caused him to use his writing talent, quickly building a new bank account with his highly popular, bestselling books of humor and cartoons about his experience, Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street in "1929 A.C. (After Crash)" and "Yoo Hoo Prosperity."

Film and television

in Kid Millions.]] Cantor also bounced back between movies and on radio. He had previously appeared in a number of short films (recording him performing his Follies songs and comedy routines) and two silent features (Special Delivery and Kid Boots) in the 1920s, and was offered the lead in The Jazz Singer when that was turned down by George Jessel (Cantor also turned it down, so it went to Al Jolson), but he became a leading Hollywood star in 1930 with the film version of Whoopee! in two-strip Technicolor. Over the next two decades, he continued making films until his last starring role in If You Knew Susie in 1948.

Filmography

Widow at the Races (1913)

A Few Moments With Eddie Cantor, Star of "Kid Boots" (1923) (DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film short film)

Kid Boots (1926)

Special Delivery (1927)

A Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic (1929) (short)

Glorifying the American Girl (1929)

That Party in Person (1928) (short)

Insurance (1930) (short)

Getting a Ticket (1930) (short)

Whoopee! (1930)

Palmy Days (1931)

Talking Screen Snapshots (1932) (short)

The Kid from Spain (1932)

Roman Scandals (1933)

The Hollywood Gad-About (1934) (short)

Kid Millions (1934)

Strike Me Pink (1936)

Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937)

The March of Time Volume IV, Issue 5 (1937) (short)

Forty Little Mothers (1940)

Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)

Show Business (1944) (also producer)

Hollywood Canteen (1944)

(1945) (short)

American Creed (1946) (short)

Meet Mr. Mischief (1947) (short) (appears on poster)

If You Knew Susie (1948)

(1949) (short)

The Story of Will Rogers (1952)

(1952) (short)

The Eddie Cantor Story (1953) (cameo)

Television

In the 1950s, he was one of the alternating hosts of the television show The Colgate Comedy Hour, in which he would introduce variety acts and play comic characters like "Maxie the Taxi." However, the show landed Cantor in an unlikely controversy when a young Sammy Davis, Jr. appeared as a guest performer. Cantor embraced Davis and mopped Davis's brow with his handkerchief after his performance. Worried sponsors led NBC to threaten cancellation of the show; Cantor's response was to book Davis for two more weeks.

On May 25, 1944, pioneer television station WPTZ (now KYW-TV) in Philadelphia presented a special telecast featuring Eddie Cantor, which was also fed to the NBC television station in New York City, WNBT (now WNBC). Cantor, one of the first major stars to agree to appear on television, was to sing "We're Havin' a Baby, My Baby and Me". Arriving shortly before airtime at the Philadelphia studios, Cantor was reportedly told to cut the song because the NBC New York censors considered some of the lyrics too risqué. Cantor refused, claiming no time to prepare an alternative number. NBC relented, but the sound was cut and the picture blurred on certain lines in the song. This is considered the first instance of television censorship.

Books and merchandising

In addition to Caught Short!: A Saga of Wailing Wall Street, Cantor wrote or co-wrote at least seven other books, including booklets released by the then-fledgling firm of Simon & Schuster, with Cantor’s name on the cover. (Some were "as told to" or written with David Freedman). Customers paid a dollar and received the booklet with a penny embedded in the hardcover. They sold well, and H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) asserted that these books did more to pull America out of the Great Depression than all government measures combined.

Bibliography

My Life Is in Your Hands by Eddie Cantor (1928) with David Freedman; Harper & Bros.

Caught Short! by Eddie Cantor (1929) Simon & Schuster

Between the Acts by Eddie Cantor (1930) Simon & Schuster

Yoo-Hoo, Prosperity!: The Eddie Cantor Five-Year Plan by Eddie Cantor (1931) with David Freedman; Simon & Schuster

The Rise of the Goldbergs by Gertrude Berg, Forward by Eddie Cantor (1931) Barse & Co.

Your Next President! by Eddie Cantor (1932) with David Freedman, Illus. by S.L. Hydeman; Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc.

Eddie Cantor in An Hour with You: A Big Little Book (1934) Whitman

Eddie Cantor Song and Joke Book (1934) Illus. by Ben Harris; M. Witmark & Sons

Ziegfeld: The Great Glorifier by Eddie Cantor (1934) with David Freedman; Alfred H. King

World's Book of Best Jokes by Eddie Cantor (1943) World Publishing Co.

Hello, Momma by George Jessel, Illus. by Carl Rose, Forward by Eddie Cantor (1946) World Publishing Co.

As I Remember Them by Eddie Cantor (1965) Duell, Sloan & Pearce

Take My Life by Eddie Cantor (1957) with Jane Kesner Ardmore; Doubleday

No Man Stands Alone by Barney Ross, Forward by Eddie Cantor (1957) B. Lippincott Co.

The Way I See It by Eddie Cantor (1959) with Phyllis Rosenteur, ed.; Prentice-Hall

Yoo-Hoo, Prosperity! and Caught Short! by Eddie Cantor (1969) Greenwood Press

The Golden Age of Sound Comedy: Comic Films and Comedians of the Thirties by Donald W. McCaffrey (1973) A.S. Barnes

Radio Comedy by Arthur Frank Wertheim (1979) Oxford University Press

The Vaudevillians: A Dictionary of Vaudeville Performers by Anthony Slide (1981) Arlington House

American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries (1984) Charles W. Stein, ed., Alfred A. Knopf

Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business by Gregory Koseluk (1995) McFarland

Eddie Cantor: A Bio-Bibliography by James Fisher (1997) Greenwood Press

Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor and the Birth of Modern Stardom by Herbert G. Goldman (1997) Oxford University Press

The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age by Leonard Maltin (1997) Dutton

My Life Is in Your Hands and Take My Life by Eddie Cantor (2000) Cooper Square Press

Film Clowns of the Depression: Twelve Defining Comic Performances by Wes D. Gehring (2007) McFarland

Eddie Cantor in Laugh Land by Harold Sherman (2008) Kessinger Publishing

Cantor's popularity led to merchandising of such products as Eddie Cantor's Tell It to the Judge game from Parker Brothers. In 1933, a set of 12 Eddie Cantor caricatures by Frederick J. Garner were published by Brown & Bigelow. These advertising cards were purchased in bulk as a direct-mail item by such businesses as auto body shops, funeral directors, dental laboratories and vegetable wholesale dealers. With the full set, companies could mail a single Cantor card each month for a year to their selected special customers as an ongoing promotion.

Cantor was often caricatured in magazines and newspapers, and he was occasionally a character in Warner Bros. cartoons, including Billboard Frolics and What's Up Doc? Cantor was depicted as a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade one of the few balloons based on a real person.

Tributes

Cantor was profiled on the program This Is Your Life, in which an unsuspecting person (usually a celebrity) would be surprised on live television by host Ralph Edwards, with a half-hour tribute. Cantor was the only subject who was told of the surprise in advance; he was recovering from a heart attack and it was felt that the shock might harm him.

On October 29, 1995, as part of a nationwide celebration of the 75th anniversary of radio, he was posthumously inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame at Chicago's Museum of Broadcasting Communication.

In 1953 Warner Bros., in an attempt to duplicate the box-office success of The Jolson Story, filmed a big-budget Technicolor feature film, The Eddie Cantor Story. The film found an audience but might have done better with someone else in the leading role. Actor Keefe Brasselle played Cantor as a caricature with high-pressure dialogue and bulging eyes wide open; the fact that Brasselle was considerably taller than Cantor didn't lend realism either. Eddie and Ida Cantor were seen in a brief prologue and epilogue set in a projection room, where they are watching Brasselle in action; at the end of the film Eddie tells Ida, "I never looked better in my life"... and gives the audience a knowing, incredulous look. George Burns, in his memoir All My Best Friends, claimed that Warner Bros. created a miracle producing the movie in that "it made Eddie Cantor's life boring".

Something closer to the real Eddie Cantor story is his self-produced 1944 feature Show Business, a valentine to vaudeville and show folks that was RKO's top-grossing film that year. Probably the best summary of Cantor's career is in one of the Colgate Comedy Hour shows. The Colgate hour was a virtual video autobiography, with Cantor recounting his career, singing his familiar hits, and re-creating his singing-waiter days with his old pal Jimmy Durante. This show has been issued on DVD as Eddie Cantor in Person.

As talented as Cantor was, he is an excellent example of the mega star who virtually vanishes with the passing of time. His biographer, Gregory Koseluk, wrote in 1995 that Eddie "is all but forgotten," (from Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business [Introduction]).

In popular culture

Eddie Cantor is a recurring character on HBO's series Boardwalk Empire, where he is played by Stephen DeRosa. He appeared in three episodes of the show's first season.

One of the main characters in Stephen King's Dark Tower Series of books is named Edward Cantor Dean (better known as "Eddie Dean").

Sources

Watch

(1923)">A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor, Star of "Kid Boots" (1923) A six-minute film made in Phonofilm by Lee De Forest featuring Cantor telling monologues and singing two songs.

Listen to

Command Performance 1942-03-01 ep001 - Eddie Cantor

Command Performance 1942-04-01_ep006 Kay Kyser & Eddie Cantor

The Chase and Sanborn Hour with Eddie Cantor (excerpts)

Free OTR: The Eddie Cantor Show (30 1936-52 episodes)

OTR Network Library: The Eddie Cantor Show (11 1936-52 episodes)

References

External links

Eddie Cantor official site

Cantor's Sidekick: Bert 'The Mad Russian' Gordon @WFMU

Category:American people of Russian descent Category:1892 births Category:1964 deaths Category:1930s American radio programs Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:Blackface minstrel performers Category:American Jews Category:Jewish American musicians Category:Jewish actors Category:American singers Category:Vaudeville performers Category:RCA Victor artists Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:American people of Russian-Jewish descent Category:Jewish comedians Category:Presidents of the Screen Actors Guild

:This is about the Broadway performer Bert Williams. For the English footballer, see Bert Williams (footballer)

Name	Bert Williams
Birth name	Egbert Austin Williams
Birth date	November 12, 1874
Birth place	Nassau, New Providence, Bahamas
Death date	April 04, 1922
Death place	New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Entertainer

Egbert Austin "Bert" Williams (November 12, 1874 – March 4, 1922) was one of the preeminent entertainers of the Vaudeville 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. In 1918, the New York Dramatic Mirror called Williams "one of the great comedians of the world."

Williams was a key figure in the development of African-American entertainment. In an age when racial inequality and stereotyping were commonplace, he became the first black American to take a lead role on the Broadway stage, and did much to push back racial barriers during his career. Fellow vaudevillian W.C. Fields, who appeared in productions with Williams, described him as "the funniest man I ever saw – and the saddest man I ever knew."

Early life

Williams was born in Nassau, Bahamas, and at the age of 10 he was brought to New York City by his parents. From New York City the family moved to Riverside, California, where Williams graduated from Riverside High School. He later went to San Francisco, intending to study to be a civil engineer, but instead joined a minstrel company known as "The Mastoden Minstrels", which played the lumber and mining camps of California. In 1893, in San Francisco he formed the team of Williams and Walker, his partner being equally celebrated straight man George Walker.

Williams became one of Vaudeville's top solo artists, but he first gained notice as half of the successful double-act "Williams & Walker." He and George Walker performed song-and-dance numbers, comic dialogues and skits, and humorous songs. They fell into stereotypical vaudevillian roles: originally Williams portrayed a slick conniver, while Walker played the "dumb coon" victim of Williams' schemes. However, they soon discovered that they got a better reaction by switching roles. The sharp-featured and slender Walker eventually developed a persona as a strutting dandy, while the stocky Williams played the languorous oaf. Despite his thickset physique, Williams was a master of body language and physical "stage business."

In late 1896, the pair were added to The Gold Bug, a struggling musical. The show did not survive, but Williams & Walker got good reviews, and were able to secure higher profile bookings. They headlined the Koster and Bial's vaudeville house for 36 weeks in 1896-97, where their spirited version of the cakewalk helped popularize the dance. The pair performed in burnt-cork blackface, as was customary at the time, billing themselves as "Two Real Coons" to distinguish their act from the many white minstrels also performing in blackface. Williams also made his first recordings in 1896, but none are known to survive.

In 1899 Bert surprised his partner George Walker and his family when he announced he had recently married Charlotte ("Lottie") Thompson, a singer with whom he had worked professionally, in a very private ceremony. Lottie was a widow 8 years Bert's senior and a homebody, thus the match seemed odd to some who knew the gregarious and constantly traveling Williams, but all who knew them considered them a uniquely happy couple and the union lasted until his death. The Williamses never had children biologically but they adopted three of Lottie's nieces and frequently sheltered orphans and foster children in their homes.

Williams & Walker appeared in a succession of shows, including A Senegambian Carnival, A Lucky Coon, and The Policy Players. Their stars were on the ascent, but they still faced vivid reminders of the limits placed on them by white society. In August 1900, in New York City, hysterical rumors of a white detective having been shot by a black man erupted into an uncontained riot. Unaware of the street violence, Williams & Walker left their theater after a performance and parted ways. Williams headed off in a fortunate direction, but Walker was yanked from a streetcar by a white mob and was beaten.

Sons of Ham and In Dahomey

The following month, Williams & Walker had their greatest success to date with Sons of Ham, a broad farce that was perhaps most notable for its lack of the extreme "darkie" stereotypes which were then common. The pair had already begun to transition away from racial minstrel conventions to a more human style of comedy. In 1901, they recorded thirteen discs for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Some of these, like "The Phrenologist Coon," were standard blackface material, but the financial lament "When It's All Going Out and Nothing Coming In" was race-blind, and became one of Williams' best-known songs. Another Williams composition, "Good Morning Carrie", was covered by many artists, becoming one of the biggest hits of 1901. These discs existed only in pressings of fewer than 1,000, and were not heard by very many listeners. Sons of Ham ran for two years.

In September 1902, Williams & Walker debuted their next vehicle, In Dahomey, which was an even bigger hit. In 1903 the production, with music by Will Marion Cook and lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar moved to New York City, where it became the first black musical to open on Broadway. This was a landmark event, but seating inside the theater was segregated. One of the musical's songs, "I'm a Jonah Man," helped codify Williams' hard-luck persona and tales of woe. In Dahomey then traveled to London, where it was enthusiastically received. A command performance was given at Buckingham Palace in June 1903.

In February 1906, Abyssinia, with a score co-written by Williams, premiered at the Majestic Theater. The show, which included live camels, was another smash. Williams committed many of its songs to disc and cylinder. One of them, "Nobody", became his signature theme, and the song he is best remembered for today. It is a doleful and ironic composition, replete with his dry observational wit, and is perfectly complemented by Williams' intimate, half-spoken singing style.

:When life seems full of clouds and rain, :And I am filled with naught but pain, :Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain? :[pause] Nobody. :When winter comes with snow and sleet, :And me with hunger and cold feet, :Who says, "Here's two bits, go and eat"? :[pause] Nobody. :I ain't never done nothin' to Nobody. :I ain't never got nothin' from Nobody, no time. :And, until I get somethin' from somebody sometime, :I don't intend to do nothin' for Nobody, no time.

Williams became so identified with the song that he was obliged to sing it in almost every appearance for the rest of his life. He considered its success both blessing and curse: "Before I got through with 'Nobody,' I could have wished that both the author of the words and the assembler of the tune had been strangled or drowned... 'Nobody' was a particularly hard song to replace." "Nobody" remained active in Columbia's sales catalogue into the 1930s, and the musicologist Tim Brooks estimates that it sold between 100,000 and 150,000 copies, a phenomenally high amount for the era.

Williams' langorous, drawling delivery was the primary selling point of several similarly-structured Williams recordings, such as "Constantly" and "I'm Neutral." Williams even recorded two compositions titled "Somebody" and "Everybody." His style was inimitable. In an era when the most popular songs were simultaneously promoted by several artists (for example, "Over There" was a top ten hit for six different acts in 1917-18), Williams' repertoire was left comparatively untouched by competing singers.

Williams & Walker were prominent success stories for the black community, and they received both extensive press coverage and frequent admonitions to properly "represent the race." Leading black newspapers mounted campaigns against demeaning stereotypes such as the word "coon." Williams & Walker were sympathetic, but also had their careers to consider, where they performed before many white audiences. The balancing act between their audience's expectations and their artistic impulses was tricky.

In his only known essay, Williams wrote:

:"People sometimes ask me if I would not give anything to be white. I answer . . . most emphatically, "No." How do I know what I might be if I were a white man? I might be a sandhog, burrowing away and losing my health for $8 a day. I might be a streetcar conductor at $12 or $15 a week. There is many a white man less fortunate and less well-equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient . . . in America."

Bandanna Land

In 1908, while starring in the successful Broadway production Bandanna Land, Williams & Walker were asked to appear at a charity benefit by George M. Cohan. Walter C. Kelly, a prominent monologist, protested and encouraged the other acts to withdraw from the show rather than appear alongside black performers. But only two of the acts joined Kelly's boycott.

Bandanna Land continued the duo's series of hits, and introduced a sketch that Williams made famous: his pantomime poker game. In total silence, Williams acted out a hand of poker, with only his facial expressions and body language conveying the dealer's up-and-down emotions. It became a standard routine in his stage act, and was recorded on film by Biograph Studios in 1916.

Solo career

Walker was in ill health by this point, apparently due to syphilis, and was forced to drop out of Bandanna Land in early 1909. The famous pair never performed in public again, and Walker died less than two years later. Walker had been the businessman and public spokesman for the duo. His absence left Williams professionally adrift. His next moves in show business were cautious and tentative. He did a short solo act for the high-class vaudeville circuit, consisting of four songs and a dance. Williams next starred as Mr. Lode of Koal, a farce about a kidnapped king that was well-received by critics, but which played a secondary string of theaters and was a box office flop.

After Mr. Lode skidded to a halt, Williams accepted an unprecedented offer to join Flo Ziegfeld's Follies. The idea of a black featured performer amid an otherwise all-white show was a shock in 1910. Williams' initial reception was cool, and several cast members delivered an ultimatum to Ziegfeld that Williams be fired. Ziegfeld held firm, saying, "I can replace every one of you, except [Williams]." The show's writers were slow to devise material for him to perform. But by the time the show finally debuted in June, Williams was a sensation. Reviews were uniformly positive for Williams, and also for Fanny Brice, who was making her Broadway debut.

Following his success, Williams signed an exclusive contract with Columbia Records, and recorded four of the show's songs. His elevated status was signaled not just by the generous terms of the contract, but by the tenor of Columbia's promotion, which dropped much of the previous "coon harmony"-type sales patter and began touting Williams' "inimitable art" and "direct appeal to the intelligence." Tim Brooks wrote, "Williams had become a star who transcended race, to the extent that was possible in 1910." All four songs sold well, and one of them, "Play That Barbershop Chord," became a substantial hit.

Few stage performers were recording regularly in 1910, in some cases because their onstage styles did not translate to the limited technical media. But Williams' low-key natural delivery was ideal for discs of the time, and his personality was warm and funny.

Williams returned for the 1911 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies, teaming up in some sketches with the comedian Leon Errol to ecstatic effect. Williams also reprised his poker routine, and popularized a song called "Woodman, Spare That Tree." In January 1913, he recorded several more sides for Columbia, including a new version of "Nobody," the 1906 copies having long since become scarce. All of the releases remained in Columbia's catalog for years. Walker continued as a featured star of the Follies, and made several more recording dates for Columbia, though he stopped writing his own songs by 1915. He also began making film appearances, though most have been lost. One of them, A Natural Born Gambler, shows his pantomime poker sketch, and is the best-known footage of Williams available.

The 1917 installment of Ziegfeld's Follies featured a rich array of talent, including W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, and Eddie Cantor, as well as Brice and Williams. Williams and Cantor did scenes together, and struck up a close friendship. In 1918-19, Williams went on a hiatus from the Follies. Over the next four years, he recorded several records in the guise of "Elder Eatmore," an unscrupulous preacher, as well as songs dealing with Prohibition, such as "Everybody Wants a Key to My Cellar," "Save a Little Dram for Me," "Ten Little Bottles," and the smash hit, "The Moon Shines on the Moonshine." By this point, Williams' records were taking up a full page in Columbia's catalog, and they were among the strongest-selling songs of the age. At a time when 10,000 sales was considered a very successful major label release, Williams had four songs that shipped between 180,000 and 250,000 copies in 1920 alone. Williams, along with Al Jolson and Nora Bayes, was one of the three most highly paid recording artists in the world.

Williams continued to face racism, but due to his success and popularity, he was in a better position to deal with it. On one occasion, when he attempted to buy a drink at the bar of New York's elegant Astor Hotel, the white bartender tried to chase Williams away by telling him that he would be charged $50. Williams' response was to produce a thick roll of hundred dollar bills out of his pocket; placing the wad on the bar, he ordered a round for everyone in the room.

Late career and death

Williams' stage career lagged after his final Follies appearance in 1919. His name was enough to open a show, but they had shorter, less profitable runs. In December 1921, Under the Bamboo Tree opened, to middling results. Williams still got good reviews, but the show did not. Williams developed pneumonia, but did not want to miss performances, knowing that he was the only thing keeping an otherwise moribund musical alive at the box office.

On February 27, 1922 Williams collapsed during a performance in Detroit, Michigan, which the audience initially thought was a comic bit. Helped to his dressing room, Williams quipped, "That's a nice way to die. They was laughing when I made my last exit." He returned to New York, but his health worsened. He died on March 4, at the age of forty-seven. Few had suspected that he was sick, and news of his death came as a public shock. More than 5,000 fans filed past his casket, and thousands more were turned away. Williams was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.

Legacy

In 1910, Booker T. Washington had written of Williams, "He has done more for our race than I have. He has smiled his way into people's hearts; I have been obliged to fight my way." Gene Buck, who had discovered W.C. Fields in vaudeville and hired him for the Follies, wrote to a friend on the occasion of Fields' death, "Next to Bert Williams, Bill [Fields] was the greatest comic that ever lived."

In 1940, Duke Ellington composed and recorded "A Portrait of Bert Williams," a subtly crafted tribute. In a memorable turn on a Boston Pops TV special, Ben Vereen performed a tribute to Williams, complete with appropriate makeup and attire, and reprising Williams' high-kick dance steps, to such classic vaudeville standards as "Waitin' for the Robert E. Lee".

The 1980 Broadway musical Tintypes featured I'm a Jonah Man, a song first popularized by Williams in 1903. In 1996, Bert Williams was inducted into the International Clown Hall of Fame.

The Archeophone label has collected and released all of Williams' extant recordings on three CDs.

See also

The Frogs (club)

African American musical theater

Footnotes

Further reading

Charters, Ann, Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams. Macmillan, 1970.

Chude-Sokei, Louis, The Last 'Darky': Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora. Duke UP, 2005.

Forbes, Camille F. Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star. Basic Civitas, 2008.

Phillips, Caryl, Dancing in the Dark, a novel about Bert Williams. Knopf, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-4396-4.

External links

"Natural Born Gambler," one of the few surviving film records of Williams' act

Songwriters Hall of Fame, biography of Bert Williams

DuBois Learning Center, biography

Bert Williams and George Walker

Williams and Walker

Bert Williams cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.

Philip Sterling research materials on Bert Williams, 1899-1981 (bulk 1959-1962)

Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library">Bert Williams at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Category:Antigua and Barbuda immigrants to the United States Category:American film actors Category:American silent film actors Category:American stage actors Category:Blackface minstrel performers Category:Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (The Bronx) Category:Deaths from pneumonia Category:Infectious disease deaths in New York Category:People from San Francisco, California Williams,Bert Williams,Bert Category:Vaudeville performers Category:1874 births Category:1922 deaths