Billy Waters is Dancing
English Dance and Song August 2024
This news item is based on articles in English Dance and Song, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance, EDS was first published in 1936 and is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts.
Writer and researcher Mary L Shannon on uncovering a little-known Regency talent
How do you tell the story of a Black fiddle-player when so few records from the early 19th century survived? This was the problem confronting me when I tried to uncover the music and dancing of William ‘Billy’ Waters, once a famous Black busker in Regency London, born in America in the dying years of the eighteenth-century, now largely overlooked by history. Sailor, immigrant, father, lover, and extraordinary talent, exploring the life of Billy Waters allows us to celebrate his creativity and to understand a diverse transatlantic Regency world.
Waters had a hit song, a famous street performance, a well-known costume and was depicted in a play that toured Britain and America. He was a Black, disabled, poor man in an era when to be any of those things was at best challenging, and usually downright dangerous. Yet Waters shaped his life on his own terms as far as he could – he joined the British Navy, got promoted to a petty officer, turned the accident which disabled him into the start of a new career as a performer, and fought hard to defend his family and his livelihood. Waters was a versatile and skilful man.
Where did he learn these skills of music and performance? I began the process of researching and writing about Billy Waters’ music with a hunch that his early life in America and at sea must, as for any artist, have shaped his performances. I knew he was American because British naval records told me so: how frequently as Waters’ biographer did I have cause to feel gratitude towards the Navy clerks and officers with their scratchy quill pens! Most of the hard facts I could verify about Waters were gleaned from the crumbling pages of British Navy record books from around the time of the War of 1812. They told me he was born in New York (probably the City rather than just the State) sometime around the years of the American Revolution. Beyond that, however, they told me nothing about Waters himself.
What did he learn growing up in early New York’s slaveholding economy? What did he learn in the British Navy? What made him into the famous performer he became? Scholar Imtiaz Habib, in his 2008 book Black Lives in the English Archives, calls this ‘the arc of invisibility’: in other words, when people are deliberately excluded from the archival record and stereotyped in popular culture, they are more than absent from history, they are erased from it. Waters was drawn by numerous artists, and written about in books, plays, and cheap print. One eye-catching picture was done circa 1821 by George and Robert Cruikshank (George later illustrated Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist). The picture shows Waters in the middle of a crowded pub in London’s St. Giles, fiddling for some dancers as drinking, fighting, and flirting unfolds around him. His caricatured features and his costume are what we see: feathered military hat, sailor jacket, white wig, and the shaft of his wooden leg. But none of these representations are by Waters himself. They all look at him through 19th century eyes. As a biographer I wanted to look with him, to imagine his world from his perspective, as much as I could. Time to look for help.
I am, of course, far from the only writer about past lives who has confronted the problem of archival violence. Saidiya Hartman’s work on histories of enslavement led to her to develop the idea of ‘critical fabulation’, or the use of creative yet research-informed approaches to telling lost stories. This gave me the permission to imagine; to bring the techniques of the novelist to the problem of biography. Alain Corbin’s phrase ‘the evocation of a life’ – from his book The Life of an Unknown about a clog maker from France for whom only the barest of records survived – showed me how historical context can also build up the picture of a person. And Paul Roberts’ work on early fiddleplaying gave me a sense of how Waters might have stood, played, and sang.
But what information did Waters leave us about his musical influences? No letters or diaries, but in the surviving images of Waters – caricatured and racialised as they are – we see traces of his performance. He holds the fiddle low against his shoulder, gripping it with his left hand rather than his chin as it slopes downwards.
His trademark song Polly Will You Marry Me drew on Dibdin’s sailor songs and the tradition of Portsmouth Poll. His sailor origins were there in the jigs and reels that he must have played. Crowd-favourites, to pull in an audience, were key, but also some new sounds: the rhythms of the African-American Pinkster festival (referenced along with his Navy background in his extravagant costume) and Black-origin shanties.
And his performances left an important legacy: for the African Company actors of 1820s New York trying to establish a Black-run theatre, for a man known only as Old Corn Meal who sang on stage in 1830s New Orleans, and for Sid Hemphill in 1950s Mississippi who sang a version of Polly Will You Marry Me on a home-made banjo recorded for posterity in the online Lomax Archive. This legacy lives on: with Dr Angeline Morrison and Dr Ben Marsh I am working to devise new music based on Waters' life as an educational resource for schools. We can’t recapture Waters’ voice, or the lost performances of the past. But we can ensure that if we continue to explore his world, Billy Waters is dancing.
Dr Mary L Shannon teaches at the University of Roehampton, London. Find her at marylshannon.com. Billy Waters is Dancing is out now with Yale Books.
Photo: Robert and George Cruikshank. Illustration from Life in London (1820-21) by Pierce Egan. Author copy.
