With a newly released set of recordings, contemporary listeners can — and contemporary performance artists should — experience black vaudevillian Bert Williams. “Like so many vaudeville artists, Williams made few film appearances. We might also know his work better if he hadn’t spent most of his career performing in blackface. Blackface has become theater’s equivalent of the mark of Cain. It’s a hard tradition to live with: there’s so much cruelty and shame there. But blackface comedy produced some superb artists.”