Billy Waters: Songs from the Shadows

About the resource

Across twenty pages packed with colourful panels, insights and ideas, Billy Waters: Songs from the Shadows uses its main character, the once-flamboyant (but subsequently little-known) Billy Waters, to explore how histories of marginalised peoples can be recovered and assessed. It includes optional pathways or “choose your own interpretation” panels that encourage discussions of positionality, mental health, violence, community, and historical bias. And it is packed with authentic references and sources that draw on cutting edge practices in the academy – drawing on the voices of figures such as Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass to substitute for silences and dialogue.

The graphic novel not only brings Waters’s impressive story to life, with its many connections to wider themes in the Age of Revolutions, but also encourages readers to reflect on how power and agency affect the practice of interpretation and the creation of histories or cultures. The story draws on the few sporadic archival references left to us about Waters – an American, sailor, fiddler, amputee, performer, pauper, and Londoner – and puts them in larger contexts to help explore the dynamics of representation in history.

The key objective is to encourage students to recognise how history is curated not captured, and how different voices – including students’ own voices – can reshape understandings of the past that are richer and more engaging. Supplementary aims are to help shed light on aspects of migration, military, medical, and Black histories – while exposing readers to a dynamic range of objects and sources from the period. It works well as a complement to units on migration, race, health, social history, and as a standalone topic for sessions on citizenship, historiography, performance, and diverse histories.