Biography billie waters artist

Biography.
Phyllis Mary Waters, known as Billie Waters was a British artist.
Billie Waters was a British painter who was born in 1896.

•

Mary L. Shannon—

How do you tell the story of unrecorded Black lives in early New York City? This was the problem confronting me when I tried to uncover the early years of William “Billy” Waters (c. 1778-1823), 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 ve

•

Billy Waters is Dancing : Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain

£25.00

The story of William Waters, Black street performer in Regency London, and how his huge celebrity took on a life of its own Every child in Regency London knew Billy Waters, the celebrated “King of the Beggars.” Likely born into enslavement in 1770s New York, he became a Royal Navy sailor. After losing his leg in a fall from the rigging, the talented and irrepressible Waters became London’s most famous street performer. His extravagantly costumed image blazed across the stage and in print to an unprecedented degree. For all his contemporary renown, Waters died destitute in 1823—but his legend would live on for decades. Mary L. Shannon’s biography draws together surviving traces of Waters’ life to bring us closer to the historical figure underlying them.Considering Waters’ influence on the London stage and his echoing resonances in visual art, and writing by Douglass, Dickens, and Thackeray, Shannon asks us to reconsider Black presences in nineteenth-century popular cul

•

Billy Waters (busker)

Beggar, actor and musician (c. 1778–1823)

Billy Waters
Waters by Thomas Lord Busby
Born	c. 1778 New York
Died	1823 (aged 44–45) St Giles Workhouse, London
Occupation(s)	Beggar, performer

Billy Waters (c. 1778–1823) was a black man who busked in London in the nineteenth century by singing, playing the violin and entertaining theatre goers with his "peculiar antics". He became famous when he appeared as a character in William Thomas Moncrieff's Tom and Jerry, or Life in London in 1821.^[1]^[2]

Biography

Billy Waters became notable as a beggar on the streets of London where he played the violin to entertain theatre-goers in exchange for halfpennies. It is said that he was formerly enslaved in America but that he traded his servitude to be a British sailor.^[3] His striking image was established by his African ancestry, a naval uniform, his peg leg, his violin and the addition of a feathered hat. Waters had lost his leg as a sailor in the navy when he fell from the rigging.^[4