The Wandering Minstrel of Puget Sound
A profile of an itinerant street performer and songwriter, known as 'Fiddler Williams,' who became a familiar, if beleaguered, fixture of late 19th-century Washington city life.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Fiddler Williams, as he is generally known, with his squeaky voice and home-made fiddle, is a familiar character in every town, large and small, in the Northwest. A few days ago he was here and nightly drew crowds in parts of the city, singing original songs on the streets to the accompaniment of his fiddle. His verses are nearly all made up as he goes along and, though, with his squeaky voice, they are not of much force, they take like hot cakes at a camp of hungry loggers. When he passes around his hat and says, 'Boys, drop in a nickel and I'll sing you one about the Seattle man who tried to climb Mount Rainier,' he is sure to get money. When Fiddler Williams is in Tacoma he sings about Seattle, and when he is in Port Townsend he cracks jokes about both. Wherever he goes, his squeaky voice and good-natured smile take with the crowd. Where Fiddler Williams was born, no one seems to know, and he avoids talking with anyone on the subject, but he has been on the Coast for twenty-five years or more. In some of his songs he refers to the time when he was a 'boy in old Missouri,' and his appearance and manner would indicate that he was reared among a backwoods community of that state. No one knows his age, either, but one would guess between 50 and 60 years. He is a picturesque, wandering minstrel of an age gone by. Everywhere he goes, his old fiddle and rusty bow hang from a loop at his coat button. It never leaves him except when he gets drunk and is locked up in jail for the night.
“When he passes around his hat and says, 'Boys, drop in a nickel and I'll sing you one about the Seattle man who tried to climb Mount Rainier,' he is sure to get money.”
Fiddler Williams represents the long-standing tradition of street performers who navigate the shifting urban landscape of Seattle. His practice of trading local commentary for spare change echoes the persistent, often criminalized, presence of buskers and itinerant artists in modern downtown corridors.
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