London’s 19th-century Black busker Billy Waters

As a disabled war veteran, Billy Waters, armed with a violin, amused crowds with song and dance – and was portrayed in books, plays and paintings

The remarkable life of Billy Waters – the first African American musician to be celebrated in Britain – came to a sad end. He died a onelegged pauper in a workhouse.

Billy, as he was widely known, hadn’t performed on any stage.

He fiddled, sang and danced as a busker on the streets of London’s

West End. It was his sole means of supporting his beloved “Poll” and their two young children. But busking was deemed begging – and illegal. Billy constantly risked arrest and, not long before he died, he was taken to court and threatened with prison if caught again. Before entering the workhouse, he pawned his fiddle.

Billy Waters died on 21 March 1823. He had become a legendary figure, hailed as a genius by writer and dramatist Douglas Jerrold. But hard facts about Waters are few and, in their absence, he’s remained obscure – his origins unknown save that he was once a sailor.

On the bicentenary of his death, a measure of justice is coming at last to this pioneering Black Londoner. An early day motion tabled in parliament by Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the MP for Streatham, recognises Waters’ contribution to popular culture; and a commemorative plaque by the Nubian Jak Community Trust was unveiled where he lived in the former St Giles ‘Rookery’, a colloquial term once given to a city slum.

As a roots-music writer, I came across Waters by chance in Dublin, where I found a striking image of him on a collection of minstrel tunes. Who was this extraordinary looking man? In the National Archives in Kew, the muster-book of the ship he sailed on revealed that William Waters was born in New York during the American revolution; and that in 1811, at the climax of the Napoleonic wars, he enlisted in the Royal Navy. But on one voyage, while aloft, he slipped and fell. The captain noted tersely: “Wm Waters fell from the main yard & broke both his legs.” His left leg was amputated below the knee.

As a wounded veteran, Waters busked to supplement a meagre pension. His hallmark attire – military-style headgear with feathers, a judge’s wig, tattered naval jacket – was a carnivalesque send-up of British authority. He sang and danced while fiddling and made use of his wooden leg to perform “peculiar antics”. An engraving, The Notorious Black Billy at Home to a London Street Party, shows him in action.

At night, he played in a pub known as The Beggar’s Opera, the gathering-place of “cadgers”, vagrants, petty thieves, sex workers and street people. The pub also attracted a few Regency bucks, or swells, who took delight in slumming – among them writer Pierce Egan. In Egan’s hugely successful book Life in London , its three protagonists visit a barely disguised Beggar’s Opera. Though not named, Waters is described.

Life in London was swiftly adapted for the stage by William Moncrieff as Tom and Jerry, opening in late 1821. Signor Paulo, a former clown, played “Billy Waters” as a disdainful, bullying and ludicrous rogue. The real Waters suffered greatly from Tom and Jerry’s racist defamation, losing his good name and, with it, his income as a busker. Two weeks after Tom and Jerry’s opening he was arrested twice on the same day, charged with “begging and collecting crowds in the streets” and “singing immodest songs”. Wounded in spirit, a year later he was gone.

Sadly Waters left no music – only one bluesy couplet, with variants, from his signature song: Polly will you marry me? Polly don’t you cry, Polly come to bed with me and get a little boy In 1959, in Mississippi, folk song collectors Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins recorded the octogenarian musician Sid Hemphill playing Polly Will You Marry Me? on a homemade banjo. “That’s an o-o-old song,” he adds.

Though much of Waters’ life remains in the shadows, he’s one of very few early Black performers we know anything about. He emerges from the margins of Regency society as an intelligent, skilful, and adventurous professional man, and a fun-loving father and husband. For a while he managed to defy the formidable odds stacked against a disabled Black immigrant. But there was no way to escape his ruthless exploitation.