Notes on the Music 9 - Nobody

[The ninth in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville. Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Medley: Alex Rogers / Bert Williams: Nobody (1905); Fred Ebb / John Kander: Mr. Cellophane (from Chicago, A Musical Vaudeville 1975) – Bert Williams – or at least his hapless "Mr. Nobody" character - is often acknowledged as the inspiration for Amos Hart in Chicago. The musical and lyrical similarities between "Nobody" and "Mr. Cellophane" were so strong that the two numbers just demanded to be combined. "Nobody" was so popular that it became, for Williams, what the Prelude in C sharp minor was to Rachmaninov – a career milestone that eventually turned into something of a millstone. Williams' Ziegfeld Follies co-star W.C. Fields once described him as “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew”.