{"id":2241,"date":"2016-12-31T07:00:37","date_gmt":"2016-12-31T12:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=2241"},"modified":"2017-01-01T13:30:09","modified_gmt":"2017-01-01T18:30:09","slug":"somebody-else-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/somebody-else-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Somebody Else, Not Me (Bert Williams)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Somebody Else, Not Me\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/NgFo_qhZuyI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Bert Williams, the most popular black entertainer of the early 20th century, recorded this in 1919 as a sequel to his huge hit, &#8220;Nobody.&#8221; It was credited to Williams and<span style=\"font-family: verdana; font-size: small;\"> James F. Hanley,<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-2323 \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Somebody-Else-sheet-music-1.jpg?resize=278%2C368\" width=\"278\" height=\"368\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Somebody-Else-sheet-music-1.jpg?w=300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Somebody-Else-sheet-music-1.jpg?resize=227%2C300&amp;ssl=1 227w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 278px) 100vw, 278px\" \/> with lyrics by Ballard MacDonald, and I learned it from Dave Van Ronk, who added the third verse and made it the title song to his second Philo Records LP, following <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/sunday-street\/\"><em>Sunday Street<\/em><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>Born in Nassau in 1875, Williams came to the United States as a child and started out singing around the saloons of San Francisco, before joining a touring minstrel company and teaming up with the dancer George Walker in the 1890s. Williams and Walker became the most popular team in African American theater when they wrote, produced, and starred in the groundbreaking Broadway show <em>In Dahomey<\/em>, the first &#8220;legit&#8221; New York hit to feature an all-black cast. They went on to write and star in more shows, and after Walker died in 1909, Williams embarked on an even more successful career as a solo act, featured in the Ziegfeld Follies. Though best known as a live performer, he was also by far the most successful African American recording artist before the blues wave of the 1920s.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\">That sounds like a pretty wonderful career, but in later years Williams has been remembered almost as much for his trials as for his successes. A brilliant man, he was never happy with the options presented by U.S. show business, where he became famous as a shambling, slow-talking clown in <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-2325 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/BertWilliamsPhotoPortraitWithCigarette-257x300.jpg?resize=257%2C300\" width=\"257\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/BertWilliamsPhotoPortraitWithCigarette.jpg?resize=257%2C300&amp;ssl=1 257w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/BertWilliamsPhotoPortraitWithCigarette.jpg?w=310&amp;ssl=1 310w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 257px) 100vw, 257px\" \/>blackface make-up. His fellow Follies star W.C. Fields famously described him as &#8220;<span class=\"st\">the funniest man I ever saw \u2013 and the saddest man I ever knew<wbr \/>.&#8221; As he put it himself, with typical understatement: &#8220;<\/span>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.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\">\u00a0Though Williams was a decent singer, his best-known performances were comic recitations, sometimes with a sung chorus. Through the early twentieth century there was a lot of overlap between recitation and song &#8212; many of the lyrics now recalled as cowboy songs, for example, were routinely performed as recitations, and an evening of saloon entertainment was as likely to include recitations of Rudyard Kipling or Robert W. Service as the songs of Stephen Foster or &#8220;She&#8217;s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.&#8221; My father, who was born in 1906, was an inveterate singer of\u00a0 pop songs, but also had some favorite recitations, such as a Yiddish dialect version of &#8220;The Face on the Barroom Floor&#8221; called &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/jake.html\">Jake the Plumber<\/a>.&#8221; And one of my favorite Greenwich Village memories is waiting in line to hear Dave Van Ronk at Folk City, and having an aging and somewhat toothless gentleman come up\u00a0 and, after a memorable introduction, recite &#8220;The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,&#8221; with suitably dramatic gestures. (His introduction was to point to the missing letter in the club&#8217;s sign and announce: &#8220;I can remember when there was a C in the Folk City marquee&#8230; that was twenty years ago, when I was a young alcoholic.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2261 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Van-Ronk-Somebody-Else.jpg?resize=250%2C250\" alt=\"van-ronk-somebody-else\" width=\"250\" height=\"250\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Van-Ronk-Somebody-Else.jpg?w=250&amp;ssl=1 250w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Van-Ronk-Somebody-Else.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px\" \/>Dave was a great fan of Bert Williams and had been thinking about recording &#8220;Nobody&#8221; for years, but Ry Cooder beat him to it, so he went with this one instead. The only problem was that it was too short, and he solved that by writing the third verse &#8212; an excellent example of his much-overlooked talents as a lyric doctor, which I&#8217;ve already discussed in reference to his reworking of Blind Blake&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/thatll-never-happen-no\/\">That&#8217;ll Never Happen No More<\/a>.&#8221; (Which, incidentally, is another song that walks the borderline between melody and recitation.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bert Williams, the most popular black entertainer of the early 20th century, recorded this in 1919 as a sequel to his huge hit, &#8220;Nobody.&#8221; It was credited to Williams and James F. Hanley, with lyrics by Ballard MacDonald, and I learned it from Dave Van Ronk, who added the third verse and made it the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/somebody-else-not\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Somebody Else, Not Me (Bert Williams)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Somebody Else, Not Me (Bert Williams) - Old Friends: A Songobiography<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/somebody-else-not\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Somebody Else, Not Me (Bert Williams) - Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Bert Williams, the most popular black entertainer of the early 20th century, recorded this in 1919 as a sequel to his huge hit, &#8220;Nobody.&#8221; It was credited to Williams and James F. 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Like most of the first round of commercial blues performers, Cox tends to be left out\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"jimmie-cox-and-magnolia-cox-from-lynn-abbott","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Jimmie-Cox-and-Magnolia-Cox-from-Lynn-Abbott.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1574,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/thatll-never-happen-no\/","url_meta":{"origin":2241,"position":1},"title":"That&#8217;ll Never Happen No More (Blind Blake\/Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 5, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This song changed my life, because when I saw a flier for a Dave Van Ronk concert at age 12, I went home and checked the two LPs I had with Van Ronk tracks, and one of them was Blues at Newport, and I put on this song, then played\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/blues-at-newport.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1601,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/darktown-strutters-ball\/","url_meta":{"origin":2241,"position":2},"title":"Darktown Strutters Ball (Shelton Brooks)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 13, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This may well have been the first old pop song I worked out for myself on guitar, and I played it regularly on the street in Harvard Square with Rob Forbes on washboard. Indeed, it was Rob who taught me the verse and helped me work out the chords to\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"darktown_strutters_newell and most","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/darktown_strutters_newell-and-most.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4935,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/you-win-again\/","url_meta":{"origin":2241,"position":3},"title":"You Win Again (Hank Williams&#8217;s blues)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"March 2, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"It seems crazy that I've got over three hundred songs in this project, and this is the first Hank Williams song I've posted. (I did \"Lovesick Blues\" a while ago, and of course heard it first from him, but he didn't write it.) I know a bunch of them --\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Hank-Williams-e1706039670576.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2779,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lovesick-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":2241,"position":4},"title":"Lovesick Blues (Hank Williams\/Emmett Miller)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 29, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Like virtually everybody, I first heard this as a Hank Willams song, though I'm not sure when or how. As I've mentioned, my Cambridge folk scene upbringing initially made me resistant to mainstream Nashville country music, Williams included, but by\u00a0 the early 1980s I was gradually coming to my senses\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/HankWilliams1952-286x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2784,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/know-means-lonesome\/","url_meta":{"origin":2241,"position":5},"title":"I Know What It Means to be Lonesome (Bill Williams)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 13, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I learned this off a lovely album by a little-known guitarist and singer from Kentucky, Bill Williams, who recorded a couple of LPs for the Blue Goose label in the 1970s. Williams was presented as a blues artist, but his music ranged all over American music, from old rural music\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Bill-Williams-LP-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2241"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2350,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions\/2350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}