Download or read book Nobody The Story Of Bert Williams written by Ann Charters and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 1983-07-21 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography of Bert Williams, an African American entertainer and comedian from the early twentieth century.
Download or read book Bert Williams why Nobody written by Vincent Douglas Smith and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Introducing Bert Williams written by Camille F. Forbes and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is not hard to argue that every black performer in show business owes something to Bert Williams. Discovered in California in 1890 by a minstrel troupe manager, Williams swiftly became a regular player in the troupe. Traveling on from the rough-and-ready "medicine shows" that then dotted the West, he rose through the ranks of big-time vaudeville in New York City, and finally ascended to the previously all-white pinnacle of live-stage success: the fabled Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. Inspite of his triumphs-he brought the first musical with an all-black cast to Broadway in 1903-he was often viewed by the black community with more critical suspicion than admiration because of his controversial decision to perform in blackface. Modest, private, and conservative in his personal life, Williams left political activism and soapbox thumping to others. More than the simple narration of a remarkable life, Introducing Bert Williams offers a fascinating window into the fraught issues surrounding race and artistic expression in American culture. The story of Williams's long and varied career is a whirlwind of inner turmoil, racial tension, glamour, and striving-nothing less than the birth of American show business.
Download or read book The Sound of Freedom written by Raymond Arsenault and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-01-19 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the landmark 1939 concert, offers insight into the period's racial climate, describes Eleanor Roosevelt's resignation from the DAR for barring Anderson's performances, and pays tribute to the singer's significant contributions.
Download or read book Popular American Recording Pioneers written by Frank Hoffmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encounter the trailblazers whose recordings expanded the boundaries of technology and brought “popular” music into America's living rooms! Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895--1925 (winner of the 2001 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award of Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research) covers the lives and careers of over one hundred musical artists who were especially important to the recording industry in its early years. Here are the men and women who brought into American homes the hits of the day--Tin Pan Alley numbers, Broadway show tunes, ragtime, parlor ballads, early jazz, and dance music of all kinds. Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895--1925 compiles rare information that was scattered in hundreds of record catalogs, hobbyist magazines, newspaper clippings, phonograph trade journals, and other sources. Look no further! This volume is the ultimate resource on the subject! You will increase your knowledge in these areas: the recording industry's formative years artists’personalities and musical styles popular music history history of recording technology Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895--1925 provides a unique “who's who” approach to popular music history. It is the definitive work on the music that was popular during America's coming of age. No music historian should be without this volume.
Download or read book Harlem Renaissance Lives from the African American National Biography written by Henry Louis Gates (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harlem Renaissance is the best known and most widely studied cultural movement in African American history. Now, in Harlem Renaissance Lives, esteemed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham have selected 300 key biographical entries culled from the eight-volume African American National Biography, providing an authoritative who's who of this seminal period. Here readers will find engagingly written and authoritative articles on notable African Americans who made significant contributions to literature, drama, music, visual art, or dance, including such central figures as poet Langston Hughes, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, aviator Bessie Coleman, blues singer Ma Rainey, artist Romare Bearden, dancer Josephine Baker, jazzman Louis Armstrong, and the intellectual giant W. E. B. Du Bois. Also included are biographies of people like the Scottsboro Boys, who were not active within the movement but who nonetheless profoundly affected the artistic and political statements that came from Harlem Renaissance figures. The volume will also feature a preface by the editors, an introductory essay by historian Cary D. Wintz, and 75 illustrations.
Download or read book An American Cakewalk written by Zeese Papanikolas and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The profound economic and social changes in the post-Civil War United States created new challenges to a nation founded on Enlightenment and transcendental values, religious certainties, and rural traditions. Newly-freed African Americans, emboldened women, intellectuals and artists, and a polyglot tide of immigrants found themselves in a restless new world of railroads, factories, and skyscrapers where old assumptions were being challenged and new values had yet to be created. In An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World, Zeese Papanikolas tells the lively and entertaining story of a diverse group of figures in the arts and sciences who inhabited this new America. Just as ragtime composers subverted musical expectations by combining European march timing with African syncopation, so this book's protagonists—who range from Emily Dickinson to Thorstein Veblen and from Henry and William James to Charles Mingus—interrogated the modern American world through their own "syncopations" of cultural givens. The old antebellum slave dance, the cakewalk, with its parody of the manners and pretensions of the white folks in the Big House, provides a template of how the tricksters, shamans, poets, philosophers, ragtime pianists, and jazz musicians who inhabit this book used the arts of parody, satire, and disguise to subvert American cultural norms and to create new works of astonishing beauty and intellectual vigor.
Download or read book The Last Darky written by Louis Chude-Sokei and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Last “Darky” establishes Bert Williams, the comedian of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as central to the development of a global black modernism centered in Harlem’s Renaissance. Before integrating Broadway in 1910 via a controversial stint with the Ziegfeld Follies, Williams was already an international icon. Yet his name has faded into near obscurity, his extraordinary accomplishments forgotten largely because he performed in blackface. Louis Chude-Sokei contends that Williams’s blackface was not a display of internalized racism nor a submission to the expectations of the moment. It was an appropriation and exploration of the contradictory and potentially liberating power of racial stereotypes. Chude-Sokei makes the crucial argument that Williams’s minstrelsy negotiated the place of black immigrants in the cultural hotbed of New York City and was replicated throughout the African diaspora, from the Caribbean to Africa itself. Williams was born in the Bahamas. When performing the “darky,” he was actually masquerading as an African American. This black-on-black minstrelsy thus challenged emergent racial constructions equating “black” with African American and marginalizing the many diasporic blacks in New York. It also dramatized the practice of passing for African American common among non-American blacks in an African American–dominated Harlem. Exploring the thought of figures such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Claude McKay, Chude-Sokei situates black-on-black minstrelsy at the center of burgeoning modernist discourses of assimilation, separatism, race militancy, carnival, and internationalism. While these discourses were engaged with the question of representing the “Negro” in the context of white racism, through black-on-black minstrelsy they were also deployed against the growing international influence of African American culture and politics in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Missing Reels written by Farran Smith Nehme and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York in the late 1980s. Ceinwen Reilly has just moved from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and she’s never going back, minimum wage job (vintage store salesgirl) and shabby apartment (Avenue C walkup) be damned. Who cares about earthly matters when Ceinwen can spend her days and her nights at fading movie houses—and most of the time that’s left trying to look like Jean Harlow? One day, Ceinwen discovers that her downstairs neighbor may have—just possibly—starred in a forgotten silent film that hasn’t been seen for ages. So naturally, it’s time for a quest. She will track down the film, she will impress her neighbor, and she will become a part of movie history: the archivist as ingénue. As she embarks on her grand mission, Ceinwen meets a somewhat bumbling, very charming, 100% English math professor named Matthew, who is as rational as she is dreamy. Together, they will or will not discover the missing reels, will or will not fall in love, and will or will not encounter the obsessives that make up the New York silent film nut underworld. A novel as winning and energetic as the grand Hollywood films that inspired it, Missing Reels is an irresistible, alchemical mix of Nora Ephron and David Nicholls that will charm and delight.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville written by Anthony Slide and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville provides a unique record of what was once America's preeminent form of popular entertainment from the late 1800s through the early 1930s. It includes entries not only on the entertainers themselves, but also on those who worked behind the scenes, the theatres, genres, and historical terms. Entries on individual vaudevillians include biographical information, samplings of routines and, often, commentary by the performers. Many former vaudevillians were interviewed for the book, including Milton Berle, Block and Sully, Kitty Doner, Fifi D'Orsay, Nick Lucas, Ken Murray, Fayard Nicholas, Olga Petrova, Rose Marie, Arthur Tracy, and Rudy Vallee. Where appropriate, entries also include bibliographies. The volume concludes with a guide to vaudeville resources and a general bibliography. Aside from its reference value, with its more than five hundred entries, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville discusses the careers of the famous and the forgotten. Many of the vaudevillians here, including Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jimmy Durante, W. C. Fields, Bert Lahr, and Mae West, are familiar names today, thanks to their continuing careers on screen. At the same time, and given equal coverage, are forgotten acts: legendary female impersonators Bert Savoy and Jay Brennan, the vulgar Eva Tanguay with her billing as “The I Don't Care Girl,” male impersonator Kitty Doner, and a host of “freak” acts.
Download or read book Lost Sounds written by Tim Brooks and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of African Americans in the early recording industry, Lost Sounds examines the first three decades of sound recording in the United States, charting the surprising roles black artists played in the period leading up to the Jazz Age and the remarkably wide range of black music and culture they preserved. Drawing on more than thirty years of scholarship, Tim Brooks identifies key black recording artists and profiles forty audio pioneers. Brooks assesses the careers and recordings of George W. Johnson, Bert Williams, George Walker, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, W. C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Wilbur Sweatman, Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Booker T. Washington, and boxing champion Jack Johnson, plus a host of lesser-known voices. Many of these pioneers struggled to be heard in an era of rampant discrimination. Their stories detail the forces––black and white––that gradually allowed African Americans to enter the mainstream entertainment industry. Lost Sounds includes Brooks's selected discography of CD reissues and an appendix by Dick Spottswood describing early recordings by black artists in the Caribbean and South America.
Download or read book In Search of the Black Fantastic written by Richard Iton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change. But as Richard Iton shows, despite the changes politics, black artists have continued to play a significant role in the making of critical social spaces.
Download or read book Darkest America Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop written by Yuval Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration and celebration of a controversial tradition that, contrary to popular opinion, is alive and active after more than 150 years. Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen investigate the complex history of black minstrelsy, adopted in the mid-nineteenth century by African American performers who played the grinning blackface fool to entertain black and white audiences. We now consider minstrelsy an embarrassing relic, but once blacks and whites alike saw it as a black art form—and embraced it as such. And, as the authors reveal, black minstrelsy remains deeply relevant to popular black entertainment, particularly in the work of contemporary artists like Dave Chappelle, Flavor Flav, Spike Lee, and Lil Wayne. Darkest America explores the origins, heyday, and present-day manifestations of this tradition, exploding the myth that it was a form of entertainment that whites foisted on blacks, and shining a sure-to-be controversial light on how these incendiary performances can be not only demeaning but also, paradoxically, liberating.
Download or read book Biographical Dictionary of African Americans Revised Edition written by Rachel Kranz and published by Infobase Holdings, Inc. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, African Americans have made important contributions to American culture. From Crispus Attucks, whose death marked the start of the Revolutionary War, to Oprah Winfrey, perhaps the most recognizable and influential TV personality today, black men and women have played an integral part in American history. This greatly expanded and updated edition of our best-selling volume, The Biographical Dictionary of Black Americans, Revised Edition profiles more than 250 of America's important, influential, and fascinating black figures, past and present—in all fields, including the arts, entertainment, politics, science, sports, the military, literature, education, the media, religion, and many more.
Download or read book SHUT UP Nobody Likes You written by Drew Kelechi and published by Drew Kelechi. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do I have these stupid looking teeth? Only weird Africans have a gap between their front teeth. It makes me look like a walking joke every time I open my mouth. Why is my hair so kinky? Nobody looks like me, and nobody wants to be my friend. This is the story of a loner who endured incessant psychological and physical battering about his race and appearance. “You have no friends. You’re not cool. You’re ugly! Shut Up!”
Download or read book Enter the Players written by Thomas S. Hischak and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Each player is discussed in a brief biography, followed by a complete list of every play and character they performed in New York. Also included are plays and musicals that were heading to New York but closed before opening. Cast replacements are indicated as well as Tony nominations and awards. Within Enter the Players, each actor comes alive as his or her career is revealed step-by-step, role-by-role. This book is an invaluable reference work and provides hours of fascinating browsing for anyone who loves theatre."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book In Dahomey written by Jesse A Shipp and published by Literary Licensing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is A New Release Of The Original 1902 Edition.
