BERT WILLIAMS & GEORGE WALKER
Vaudeville actor George was born
around 1873 in Lawrence, Kansas. He began his show business career as
a member of a troupe of Black minstrels which traveled throughout his home state. He
then decided to try his luck as a solo act and worked his way to California in medicine
shows. Egbert Williams was born in Antigua, the West Indies, on March 11,
1875. In 1885, his family moved to California, near Los Angeles. He
attended Stanford University for a few semesters, then moved to San Francisco. There
he gained experience performing in saloons, restaurants, and road shows. Williams
met Walker in San Francisco in 1893, and the pair spent two years playing different venues
and putting together their act.
During this time, they were employed by the
Mid-Winter Exposition in golden Gate Park to work at an exhibit of a Dahomeyan village
intended to portray life in darkest Africa. Because the real Africans were late in
arriving, Williams and Walker played Dahomeyans, wearing animal skins in a setting of
potted palms. Once the Africans did arrive, the duo took time to study the natives'
singing and dancing, an experience which was to become an important influence on their
work. The two men made their way to Chicago in 1895, and tried out for Isham's
Octoroons, one of the first African American companies to break from a strict minstrel
format.
A week later, Williams and Walker were
dropped from the show. Realizing that their act needed improvement, they decided to
embrace the coon stereotype, billing themselves as "The Two Real Coons."
They based their act on standard minstrel routines reduced to a two-man performance.
Walker played the part of a dandy and told the jokes, and Williams, dressed in
mismatched, oversized clothes, and played the straight man. After the audience
reacted favorably to a performance in which he blackened his face, Williams donned the
burnt-cork mask for the rest of his professional life. "Real Coons" In
1896, a musical farce called The Gold bug made Williams and Walker famous. The play
was weak, but the duo's performance of the cakewalk captured the audience's attention, and
they soon became so closely associated with this dance that many people thought playing
this well-known venue was a step up for them, and many doors opened as a result.
For the next two years, Williams and Walker
toured the country on the vaudeville circuit as stars of the show. In 1897, they
performed in London, but apparently the British audiences did not understand their comedic
approach, and they were not well received. Williams wrote..long before our run
terminated, we discovered an important fact: that the hope of the colored performer must
be in making a radical departure from the old time "darky" style of singing and
dancing. So we set ourselves the task of thinking along new lines. The first
move was to rent a flat on 53rd St., furnish it, and throw open our doors. The
Williams and Walker flat soon became the headquarters of all the artistic young men of
most talented members of our race. On October 11, 1901, when Williams and Walker
made their first recordings for the Victor Company, they became the first African-American
recording artists. Walker's voice sounded thin on the playback, and he was not
pleased. William's voice, on the other hand, was strong, and the recordings he made
over the next 20 years created a legacy of his original material. Combined with
their desire to shift focus away from the coon stereotype gave impetus to their next big
step.
Remembering their job as
"Dahomeyans" in San Francisco, they decided to set the scene of their next
production in Africa, and in 1902, the duo allowed them to achieve their dream of
performing on Broadway. Williams, now an experienced actor and a mime with
incomparable timing, emerged as one of the leading comedians in the country. At the
time, George Walker was quoted as saying, "My partner, Mr. Williams, is the first man
I know of in our race to attempt to delineate a darky in a perfectly natural way, and I
think much of his success is due to this fact." In the spring of 1903, the team
achieved its greatest accomplishment when they took "In Dahomey" to
England. Initially the show played to a sympathetic but not very spirited
audience. However, on June 23, the tide turned after a lavish command performance at
Buckingham Palace for Edward VII on the birthday of the Prince of Wales (later Duke of
Windsor).
Revised: July 18, 2013.