Nobody

Bert Williams (1874–1922); Alex Rodgers (dates unknown) 

Like most of the pre-rock songs in this project, I first heard it on the radio. (I also saw Bob Hope perform it in a 1955 movie, The Seven Little Foys.) But I wasn’t aware of Bert Williams until the ‘70s or ‘80s. “Nobody” struck me as being way more powerful than most of the stuff I was hearing from the period. And of all the 100 songs I chose, this was the one that fooled me the most. I assumed it was written in the late nineteen-teens or early 20s, but when I found out it was from 1906, I realized how advanced it was compared to its contemporaries.

All I was able to find out about Rodgers was that he was black, wrote the lyrics, and had written lyrics to a number of Broadway songs.

Williams was born in the Bahamas and brought to the U.S. at the age of 11, where he first found recognition as part of a duo, Williams and Walker. He went solo in the early nineteen-aughts, by which time he was one of the biggest stars in vaudeville. You could say he was the first black superstar. However, he had to hire a White man to pretend to be his manager, because theatres wouldn’t put money into a black man’s hand. 

According to the New York Daily News of the time, Actors Equity declared a strike against New York stage productions on August 23, 1919. Bert Williams reported for work that night to a darkened theatre. Because he wasn’t in Equity, he didn’t know about the strike, and nobody told him. Despite twenty-plus years as one of the most successful and respected stage performers in New York, he had not been invited to join. 

W.C. Fields petitioned on his behalf, and in August 1920, he became the first black member of Actors Equity. Fields said of him, “The funniest man I ever saw—and the saddest.”