Walker, George (1873-1911)

George Walker won fame at the turn of the twentieth century as the comedy half of the African American team of Williams and Walker. Up-to-date costuming, quick urban wit, and the character of the strutting dandy became the trademarks of his onstage persona. Walker's collaboration with Bert Williams resulted in one of the most popular black comedy teams to appear in successful musical comedy productions in the early 1900s. Beyond his personal fame, Walker also devoted great energy to the professionalization of black theater and performance. He served as a model to younger performers, and his efforts to form black professional organizations helped establish and maintain artistic and ethical standards for those working on the stage. Moreover, Walker's ambitious productions demanded scores of singers and dancers who gained employment and valuable stage experience.

Walker's humble beginnings did not predict the central role he would play in the black acting fraternity of the early twentieth century. Born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1873, Walker began his career as part of a medicine show using the moniker "Nash" Walker. The show made its way westward to San Francisco, where in 1893, Walker met and teamed up with Bert Williams. The two formed a vaudeville act, toured with a succession of minstrel troupes, medicine shows, and traveling vaudeville shows, and found themselves stranded and unemployed in Chicago in the mid-1890s.

By this time, the pair had polished an act in which Williams played the straight man and Walker supplied the comic punch lines, so they continued from Chicago on to New York. There they made a splash in a bit sketch in Victor Herbert's otherwise unsuccessful Gold Bug (1896) and attracted the attention of producers of other comedy revues. They joined prominent white acts like McIntyre & Heath and Helena Mora in the Hyde Show, but left it in 1897 to join an all-black company in Will Marion Cook's Clorindy. Although the show did not succeed, their experience convinced them to seek the services of a professional management team. After reaching an agreement with Hurtig & Seamon, Williams and Walker starred in a string of musical comedies that put them at the center of the New York entertainment scene.

Under Hurtig & Seamon's management, Walker and Williams appeared in a variety show, A Lucky Coon, and three musical comedies that featured fuller plots, opportunities to act as well as sing and dance, and double-edged comedy that appealed to black and white audiences alike. In 1899, Walker married a talented singer and dancer, Aida Overton, who had joined the company a year earlier. His wife became a featured player in all the subsequent Williams and Walker musical comedies. While The Policy Players (1899) and The Sons of Ham (1900) enjoyed considerable success, it was Williams and Walker's In Dahomey (1902) that brought them national and international fame. The opening of this show on February 18, 1903 marked the first time a full-length African American musical comedy in three acts appeared on a Broadway stage. Following a run of 53 performances, the show traveled to England, where it remained for two seasons. A successful command performance at Buckingham Palace assured the show's success in London. Upon returning to the United States, the Williams and Walker company took In Dahomey on tour in this country for the 1904-1905 season.

Disagreements with their managers led to a break, and the two comedians signed with Melville B. Raymond and organized the extravagant production, Abyssinia, in 1905. Although Bert Williams was a more popular and perhaps more talented performer, George Walker supplied the main ideas for this production, which featured avant garde lighting effects, elaborate props, and elegant costumes for the entire cast. In their final show, Bandanna Land (1907), George Walker fell ill and was forced to retire from show business in the middle of the 1908-1909 season. He died in 1911.

Shortly before his retirement, Walker helped found an organization for African American professional entertainers. Like the more famous white actor's social club, the Lambs, the Frogs intended to promote "social intercourse between the representative members of the Negro theatrical profession." Under Walker's leadership, the Frogs maintained club rooms in Harlem, organized occasional events like the "Frolic of the Frogs" that featured prominent black acts, dining, and dancing, and represented a standard of excellence in stage work to which younger entertainers were encouraged to aspire. Having devoted the last years of his career to this organization, Walker was remembered at his death as a "dominating force in the theatrical world more because of the service he rendered the colored members of the profession because of the opportunities he created than for the types he has originated." Although adored for his famous stage smile, his insistence on fashionable costuming, and his practiced—and oft-imitated—dandy strutting on stage, George Walker set his sights higher than personal fame in Jim Crow America of the early 1900s. His chief aim, according to his friend Lester Walton, was "to elevate the colored theatrical profession, and the race as well … to give as elaborate productions as the white shows and play in the best theatres." To an extent, he realized this dream, but his death also marked the beginning of the rapid decline of black musical comedy in pre-World War I America.

—Susan Curtis

Further Reading:

Curtis, Susan. The First Black Actors on the Great White Way. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1998.

Riis, Thomas L. Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890-1915. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Walton, Lester A. "Death of George W. Walker." New York Age. January 12, 1911, 6.