George Walker (vaudeville)

George Walker (1872 or 1873 – 1911) was an American vaudevillian. In 1893, in San Francisco, Walker met Bert Williams, who became his performing partner. Walker and Williams appeared in The Gold Bug (1895), Clorindy (1897), The Policy Player (1899), Sons of Ham (1900), In Dahomey (1902), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandanna Land (1907). He was married to dancer and choreographer Ada Overton Walker.

George W. Walker was born in 1873 in Lawrence Kansas, the son of a policeman. He began his career as a child performer, touring in black minstrel and medicine shows. These performances eventually led Walker to San Francisco in 1893, where at the age of 20, he would meet Bert Williams.

Two prominent figures of the minstrel era were Bert Williams and George Walker. When the duo appeared on the minstrel scene, they dubbed themselves the "Two Real Coons" at the Casino Theatre in New York City in 1896. The debut of Williams and Walker was considered to be significant to black comedy and black professional theatre because of their innovations, such as the hit musical comedy In Dahomey that toured Europe and the United States, popularizing the cakewalk, and professionalizing American black theatre by founding professional organizations for black entertainers.

In 1893, the famous duo of George Walker and Bert Williams was formed. The two met in San Francisco that year and formed a vaudeville act. Williams was very talented, with light skin and a fine voice, and he played all instruments very well. Under the expectations of the time, he would be considered the "straight man" in comedy routines. Walker was a great comedian and dancer, with dark skin, and would be expected to play the fool. The two realized that they were much funnier when they reversed their roles, so "...Walker became the straight man--dressed a little too high-style and spending all the money he could borrow or trick out of the lazy, careless, unlucky Williams--and Williams became the blumbery, sorrowful, comical-in-spite-of-himself patsy." Bert Williams's first ambitions were to attend Stanford University and become an engineer. Since he could not afford to go, he worked as a singing waiter in hotels in San Francisco. George Walker had performed in traveling medicine shows before ending up in San Francisco and joining up with Williams. Once they became organized, they needed a selling point to get their names out in the theatre world. Their act grew popular in West coast theatres, where the minstrel shows were now being called vaudeville.

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