Sunday Morning Coming Down

knothead wrote:

Bob wrote:and now this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8IKh8YB9uQ

(that's part 1 of 6 parts and you can easily find the others if you desire)

Holy shit . . . . . . the dude is awesome a master!

That dude is amazing

I agree.

Ricky Jay is also one of the most knowledgable people in the world on the topic of entertainment and entertainers of the long ago past. He's authored several books about that.
This video has Ricky Jay sitting at a card table with his poker playing friends including actor John C. Reilly who you will recognize and Jay is showing them how master card cheats do their cheating.
(This link is part 2 of a 2 part video and if you have any interest in seeing that you should probably start with part 1 which you will easily find).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMHVSVKoOm8

But I linked that only for this reason. At about the 8 minute mark on the video they refer to an early entertainer named Bert Williams. And we learn that W.C. Fields described Williams as "the funniest man I ever saw – and the saddest man I ever knew".
That really piqued my interest having never heard of Williams. So I wiki'ed him and wow he is a fascinating story...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Williams

Williams was apprently so popular that they named a WW2 liberty ship in his honor, the SS Bert Williams. Even though he was a black man and had died all the way back in 1922. Pretty damn amazing for that era.

Because of discovering Ricky Jay I'm now learning about stuff I would have never known about. And by that I mean all the stuff that came before movies and tv.

Lord only knows what must have been inside this dude's head.

His signature song was called "Nobody" Here's the wiki on it including the lyrics which just blow my mind (not only because it was conceived but also because it became a monster hit which is additionally saying something about the audience of the time)...
______________________________________________

"Nobody", became his signature theme, and the song he is best remembered for today. It is a doleful and ironic composition, replete with his dry observational wit, and is perfectly complemented by Williams' intimate, half-spoken singing style.

When life seems full of clouds and rain,
And I am filled with naught but pain,
Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain?
[pause] Nobody.
When winter comes with snow and sleet,
And me with hunger and cold feet,
Who says, "Here's two bits, go and eat"?
[pause] Nobody.
I ain't never done nothin' to Nobody.
I ain't never got nothin' from Nobody, no time.
And, until I get somethin' from somebody sometime,
I don't intend to do nothin' for Nobody, no time.

Williams became so identified with the song that he was obliged to sing it in almost every appearance for the rest of his life. He considered its success both blessing and curse: "Before I got through with 'Nobody,' I could have wished that both the author of the words and the assembler of the tune had been strangled or drowned... 'Nobody' was a particularly hard song to replace." "Nobody" remained active in Columbia's sales catalogue into the 1930s, and the musicologist Tim Brooks estimates that it sold between 100,000 and 150,000 copies, a phenomenally high amount for the era.
______________________________________

And if just the text of the lyrics is not strange enough, it gets even stranger when you hear Williams' voice on the recording. Listen to it here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjyIoWIZXtY

NOTE: the text of the wiki lyrics are slightly different than the lyrics on the recording. And this is an even different version...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_%281905_song%29