Outsider Art

Abstract

When Bert Williams was performing the audience favorite “Nobody,” he was one of the most well-known Americans of the time, certainly among the best-known African Americans in the first two decades of the century. It is not incidental to his success that Williams was an immigrant, literally so, born in Antigua in the West Indies; and symbolically so, in terms of his relocation to a metropolitan center alongside thousands of other African Americans who moved northward in the Great Migration—Northern cities increasing their black populations to an average of 22 percent in the first two decades of the century. Williams shared his immigrant status with thousands of others, including the nation’s most famous songwriter, Irving Berlin, born in Russia, and a huge immigrant community in New York City, a third of whom did not speak English.

The long-haired high-brows call me “vulgarian”

When the “Great Big Beautiful Doll” I croon

For the music that’s real American

And the joy of my heart is a rag time tune.

—Eugene O’Neill, “Ballad of the Modern Music Lover”