Bert Williams 1874-1922 "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." "A black face, run-down shoes and elbow-out make-up give me a place to hide. The real Bert Williams is crouched deep down inside the coon who sings the songs and tells the stories." Born in Nassau, Bahamas in 1875, Egbert Austin Williams moved to New York and then California with his family as a boy. Forced to abandon his college study of civil engineering at Stanford to earn a living, he turned his self-taught musical skills and gift for comic mimicry into a lifelong career. Bert first entered show business as a barker for medicine shows in the Riverside area. At the time, medicine shows traveled the small towns and villages throughout the country ...