Bitter, sweet and every note in between.
We're still on the boundary between two centuries. Old ways cling to us. New ways entice and threaten. Future generations will watch our struggle: our first experiments with electronic music and video art; our furious efforts to keep up with how language and thinking change.
That's why the innovators at the start of the last century are so interesting. They struggled with all the things we take for granted. Movies still clung to fine art and stage pictures. Victorian language shadowed the terse rhythms and clear imagery of modern writers. Theater's fascination with the speech of blacks and immigrants kept veering from naturalism to caricature.
Vaudeville and musical theater were the popular entertainments. They weren't just talent variety shows, they were ethnic variety shows. There was the Irish comedy of Harrigan and Hart, the "Dutch" or Jewish comedy of Weber and Fields, the "Afro-American" comedy of Williams and Walker. (Afro-American was Walker's term, though he and Williams also used the word "darky." It's an unpalatable word now; black entertainers used it then as hip-hop musicians use "nigga.") Never has black speech been more influential in American or global culture than it is now. Hip-hop is the ruling form. But black rhythms, tones and slang have always been essential to American talk and performance.
The black vaudevillian Bert Williams was one of the early masters. He wasn't just ahead of his time; he's in the vanguard of ours. Theater historians have long acknowledged Williams as a great comic artist. Now we can hear his innovations firsthand, thanks to Archeophone, a company devoted to preserving early popular American music. Archeophone (www.archeophone.com) has issued a complete three-disc set of Williams recordings from the first two decades of the 20th century. [...]
| Continue Margo Jefferson's New York Times essay "Blackface Master Echoes in Hip-Hop"
posted in articles on October 13, 2004 3:56 AM
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