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| Barely north of her prime... |
“Life isn’t the easiest thing, but if we can learn to do more laughing about it, it won’t weigh so heavily on us.”
Ethel Waters should have never had a chance in the world, but she reigned as one of the leading performers of the 1920s and opened doors for black Americans across the emerging media of the decades that followed. She caught hell for opening a few of them - from black Americans, specifically - but her career embodied the progress and stumbles of an evolving American culture, both pop and otherwise.
Because so much of Waters’ story takes place after the 20s, placing her in that decade feels a little like cheating - i.e., since so many of her achievements came after 1930, why include her while pushing a legend like Duke Ellington to the 1930s? I don’t have a good answer for that beyond, well, I made a choice.
Ethel Waters came into the world in 1896 in Chester, Pennsylvania, but not into a stable family. Her birth resulted from the rape of her mother, Louise Anderson, by a family acquaintance, John Waters, who happened to be a pianist. Her mother passed her to her grandmother, a housemaid who provided her less a home than a rapid succession of places where she happened to live. Waters married, and poorly, at the disturbing age of 13, but had the sense and confidence to leave her abusive husband before too long. As the rest of her life proved, she knew how to survive. Still, and not surprisingly, she described growing up in bitter terms:
“I never was a child. I never was cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family.”
Her career started while she lived in Philadelphia, supporting herself as a maid at a hotel. One night, Waters attended a costume party at a nightclub and somehow got an opportunity to sing. She nailed her unplanned debut and parlayed that to performing at Baltimore’s Lincoln Theater earning $10/week, twice as much as she did as a maid (Wikipedia’s entry notes that her managers stole her tips, so who knows what she might have earned). That stumble into show business started a long, fraught career that continued somewhere between A-List and B-List until the 1950s.
Ethel Waters has a full biography - 2007’s Stormy Weather, written by Stephen Bourne - but not a lot of online sources devoted to her or her legacy. Her Wikipedia page was the most thorough, low-hanging source I found, but she lingered close enough to the present that you don’t have to look hard to find video clips of her - say, an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1972. Some other sources added details to her career - e.g., Blackpast noting she was the first Black person nominated for a Primetime Emmy (1961, a role on TV’s Route 66), or The Complicated History of Ethel Waters, a video short that addresses her sense of betrayal at the NAACP for their criticism - but nearly everything that comes below follows Wikipedia’s narrative.
At first, Waters’ career went nowhere but up. After landing the Baltimore theater gig, she moved to Atlanta to work in the same troupe as the legendary Bessie Smith. Smith forbade Waters from singing the blues (and Smith was feisty), but that put her on stage with the top talent of the 1920s. Waters might have won in the long run because singing standards and Broadway tunes opened other opportunities for her. By 1919, she’d moved to Harlem, landed her first stage job - a blackface comedy called, Hello 1919 - held a steady singing gig at a place called Edmond’s Cellar, and generally planted herself in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. It was a time and place for libertines, something Waters embraced both in her personal life - she lived with a dancer named Ethel Williams as one of “The Two Ethels” - and several of her songs - e.g., her racy take on “Come Up and See Me Sometime” and “Organ Grinder Blues” (they laid heavily in enough into the word “organ” for a quatre entendre). She also went from strength to strength in her recording career, starting with a tiny label called Cardinal Records in 1921, only to move up one year to the next, first to Black Swan (who made her the highest-paid recording artist of the early ‘20s), then to Paramount when the latter bought out the former, and finally to Columbia Records in 1925. She recorded her signature song for the latter with “Dinah,” but she’d had hits aplenty by then.
Everything grew bigger along with Waters career, the rooms she played, the jobs she could land, and the people she could work with: she graduated from Edmond’s Cellar to the Plantation Club on Broadway by the mid-1920s, and she became the first Black woman to appear on Broadway in As Thousands Cheer. She worked with (and criticized) the famous bandleader Fletcher Henderson (she said he couldn’t hit “the damn-it-to-hell bass"), as well as some of the best Tin Pan Alley songwriters. Waters even showed a talent for arranging music when she and a woman named Pearl White worked up an unreleased Harry Akst song called “Am I Blue?”
One of the first oddities of Ethel Waters career came in the 1920s, when she toured with an outfit called Keith Vaudeville Circuit. Unlike many of her Black contemporaries (if not most), the Keith Vaudeville company played in front of White audiences; they called the performances “white time” and paired them with silent movies. The quote at the top of the post came from that interview with Dick Cavett, who brought up the subject of “white time,” Waters had the curious but firm reaction of claiming that anyone with the talent could play “white time,” and even got close to waving away segregation. While that’s not so odd given her personal history (i.e., early success on Broadway, some later choices in her career), but that perspective feels narrow and for lack of a better phrase, borderline unconscious about what those "white time" audience expected - e.g., a lot of references to the "Lost Cause."
Despite her success with the Keith Vaudeville Circuit and a run as the highest-paid performer on Broadway, steady work dried up for Waters just like it did for everyone else when the Great Depression wiped out everything including the recording industry. She found work at the famous Cotton Club by the early 1930s, but the experience wasn’t a pleasant one - per her autobiography, Waters “sang ‘Stormy Weather’ from the depths of a private hell in which I was being crushed and suffocated.’” Finding too little work in Harlem, she packed up and moved West - to Hollywood.
Screens big and small became the second-to-last pivot in Waters’ career. She’d worked in movies before - 1933’s satirical all-Black film, Rufus Jones for President, which starred a young Sammy Davis Jr. - but her first job in her post-Harlem career came in a movie called Cairo. Waters broke through on the small screen with the surprisingly early (for TV) one-time variety show, The Ethel Waters Show. She received considerable attention during her career - among them, an Academy Award nomination for “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” and a Best Supporting Actress nomination for 1949’s Pinky, as well as the Emmy nomination noted above - but Waters also pissed off (John Ford) and alienated (Elia Kazan) some of Tinsel-Town’s biggest directors (Kazan apparently once recalled Waters’ "truly odd combination of old-time religiosity and free-flowing hatred.").
Waters had one final breakthrough when she became the first Black American (or maybe just Black woman) to star in her own TV show in 1950. Titled Beulah, the show has a messy history - e.g., it started as a radio show with a white guy named Marlin Hurt voicing Beulah - but it was a sit-com with an historically familiar set-up: “Most of the comedy in the series derived from the fact that Beulah, referred to as "the queen of the kitchen", has the ability to solve the problems that her employers cannot figure out.” Jokes that worked in the 1930s and 40s didn’t by the 1950s and the way the show trafficked in stereotypes drew the ire of the NAACP and chased away a number of actors, including Waters.
Her life took a sharp turn south after Beulah; robberies followed the IRS seizing her royalties for back taxes, followed weight-gain that left Waters too heavy to perform. Broke and without a means to earn a living - a classic "rock-bottom" moment - Waters wandered into a Billy Graham Crusade at Madison Square Garden in 1957…and walked out of it at peace, saved and transformed. She landed a couple of jobs after that - e.g., guest-starring on The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1957 and 1959 - but hitting the road for Billy Graham Crusades ultimately became her final act. Waters passed in 1977, besieged by a number of ailments, but probably as close to at peace as she’d ever been. For what it's worth, I'll never stop wondering how the Ethel Waters of, say, 1921-1935 would have seen her later life, something I'm not even sure her biographies addressed.
About the Sampler
Some of Ethel Waters’ most famous tunes appear both above and on the sampler, but, to catch some I left out, there’s also “Taking a Chance on Love,” “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” while Blackpast.org shouted out, “Memories of You,” “Porgy,” “Georgia on My Mind” and “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” While the sampler does include some of her famous work - I haven’t mentioned the lively, smokin' “Heat Wave” - a couple other songs caught my ear over the past week or so.
First, and most notably, Waters turned in one hell of a piece of social commentary with the haunting “Miss Otis Regrets.” There’s a movie in that masterpiece. Also, I did remember to get “Cabin in the Sky” on the sampler, one of her more famous tunes. I’d file the rest under songs that I either know - e.g., “I Got Rhythm” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” (and, for that matter “Come up and See Me Sometime”) - or that just had some quality I either liked or found representative. Ethel Waters left a massive catalog, so, rather than repeat the mistake of trying to listen to everything (like I did on Blind Lemon Jefferson), I picked through a couple collections and came out with, “Shadows on the Swanee,” “Careless Love,” “Moonglow” (I have a thing for “moon” themed songs), “Harlem on My Mind,” and “You Can’t Do What My Last Man Did.”
Unlike contemporaries like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (both covered earlier; hit those links if you’re curious), most of Waters’ material has decent sound quality. The sound doesn’t have the same blues inflection either - it’s more popular in tone. That worked for her, because the popular music from the 20s didn't fall out of style as abruptly and permanently as the "royalty of blues" material. Overall, most of Waters' sound listens like what you’d expect from the 1920s - up-tempo, a little racy (a lot here and there), but without the big, smooth sound of the coming big-band era.
Ethel Waters should have never had a chance in the world, but she reigned as one of the leading performers of the 1920s and opened doors for black Americans across the emerging media of the decades that followed. She caught hell for opening a few of them - from black Americans, specifically - but her career embodied the progress and stumbles of an evolving American culture, both pop and otherwise.
Because so much of Waters’ story takes place after the 20s, placing her in that decade feels a little like cheating - i.e., since so many of her achievements came after 1930, why include her while pushing a legend like Duke Ellington to the 1930s? I don’t have a good answer for that beyond, well, I made a choice.
Ethel Waters came into the world in 1896 in Chester, Pennsylvania, but not into a stable family. Her birth resulted from the rape of her mother, Louise Anderson, by a family acquaintance, John Waters, who happened to be a pianist. Her mother passed her to her grandmother, a housemaid who provided her less a home than a rapid succession of places where she happened to live. Waters married, and poorly, at the disturbing age of 13, but had the sense and confidence to leave her abusive husband before too long. As the rest of her life proved, she knew how to survive. Still, and not surprisingly, she described growing up in bitter terms:
“I never was a child. I never was cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family.”
Her career started while she lived in Philadelphia, supporting herself as a maid at a hotel. One night, Waters attended a costume party at a nightclub and somehow got an opportunity to sing. She nailed her unplanned debut and parlayed that to performing at Baltimore’s Lincoln Theater earning $10/week, twice as much as she did as a maid (Wikipedia’s entry notes that her managers stole her tips, so who knows what she might have earned). That stumble into show business started a long, fraught career that continued somewhere between A-List and B-List until the 1950s.
Ethel Waters has a full biography - 2007’s Stormy Weather, written by Stephen Bourne - but not a lot of online sources devoted to her or her legacy. Her Wikipedia page was the most thorough, low-hanging source I found, but she lingered close enough to the present that you don’t have to look hard to find video clips of her - say, an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1972. Some other sources added details to her career - e.g., Blackpast noting she was the first Black person nominated for a Primetime Emmy (1961, a role on TV’s Route 66), or The Complicated History of Ethel Waters, a video short that addresses her sense of betrayal at the NAACP for their criticism - but nearly everything that comes below follows Wikipedia’s narrative.
At first, Waters’ career went nowhere but up. After landing the Baltimore theater gig, she moved to Atlanta to work in the same troupe as the legendary Bessie Smith. Smith forbade Waters from singing the blues (and Smith was feisty), but that put her on stage with the top talent of the 1920s. Waters might have won in the long run because singing standards and Broadway tunes opened other opportunities for her. By 1919, she’d moved to Harlem, landed her first stage job - a blackface comedy called, Hello 1919 - held a steady singing gig at a place called Edmond’s Cellar, and generally planted herself in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. It was a time and place for libertines, something Waters embraced both in her personal life - she lived with a dancer named Ethel Williams as one of “The Two Ethels” - and several of her songs - e.g., her racy take on “Come Up and See Me Sometime” and “Organ Grinder Blues” (they laid heavily in enough into the word “organ” for a quatre entendre). She also went from strength to strength in her recording career, starting with a tiny label called Cardinal Records in 1921, only to move up one year to the next, first to Black Swan (who made her the highest-paid recording artist of the early ‘20s), then to Paramount when the latter bought out the former, and finally to Columbia Records in 1925. She recorded her signature song for the latter with “Dinah,” but she’d had hits aplenty by then.
Everything grew bigger along with Waters career, the rooms she played, the jobs she could land, and the people she could work with: she graduated from Edmond’s Cellar to the Plantation Club on Broadway by the mid-1920s, and she became the first Black woman to appear on Broadway in As Thousands Cheer. She worked with (and criticized) the famous bandleader Fletcher Henderson (she said he couldn’t hit “the damn-it-to-hell bass"), as well as some of the best Tin Pan Alley songwriters. Waters even showed a talent for arranging music when she and a woman named Pearl White worked up an unreleased Harry Akst song called “Am I Blue?”
One of the first oddities of Ethel Waters career came in the 1920s, when she toured with an outfit called Keith Vaudeville Circuit. Unlike many of her Black contemporaries (if not most), the Keith Vaudeville company played in front of White audiences; they called the performances “white time” and paired them with silent movies. The quote at the top of the post came from that interview with Dick Cavett, who brought up the subject of “white time,” Waters had the curious but firm reaction of claiming that anyone with the talent could play “white time,” and even got close to waving away segregation. While that’s not so odd given her personal history (i.e., early success on Broadway, some later choices in her career), but that perspective feels narrow and for lack of a better phrase, borderline unconscious about what those "white time" audience expected - e.g., a lot of references to the "Lost Cause."
Despite her success with the Keith Vaudeville Circuit and a run as the highest-paid performer on Broadway, steady work dried up for Waters just like it did for everyone else when the Great Depression wiped out everything including the recording industry. She found work at the famous Cotton Club by the early 1930s, but the experience wasn’t a pleasant one - per her autobiography, Waters “sang ‘Stormy Weather’ from the depths of a private hell in which I was being crushed and suffocated.’” Finding too little work in Harlem, she packed up and moved West - to Hollywood.
Screens big and small became the second-to-last pivot in Waters’ career. She’d worked in movies before - 1933’s satirical all-Black film, Rufus Jones for President, which starred a young Sammy Davis Jr. - but her first job in her post-Harlem career came in a movie called Cairo. Waters broke through on the small screen with the surprisingly early (for TV) one-time variety show, The Ethel Waters Show. She received considerable attention during her career - among them, an Academy Award nomination for “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” and a Best Supporting Actress nomination for 1949’s Pinky, as well as the Emmy nomination noted above - but Waters also pissed off (John Ford) and alienated (Elia Kazan) some of Tinsel-Town’s biggest directors (Kazan apparently once recalled Waters’ "truly odd combination of old-time religiosity and free-flowing hatred.").
Waters had one final breakthrough when she became the first Black American (or maybe just Black woman) to star in her own TV show in 1950. Titled Beulah, the show has a messy history - e.g., it started as a radio show with a white guy named Marlin Hurt voicing Beulah - but it was a sit-com with an historically familiar set-up: “Most of the comedy in the series derived from the fact that Beulah, referred to as "the queen of the kitchen", has the ability to solve the problems that her employers cannot figure out.” Jokes that worked in the 1930s and 40s didn’t by the 1950s and the way the show trafficked in stereotypes drew the ire of the NAACP and chased away a number of actors, including Waters.
Her life took a sharp turn south after Beulah; robberies followed the IRS seizing her royalties for back taxes, followed weight-gain that left Waters too heavy to perform. Broke and without a means to earn a living - a classic "rock-bottom" moment - Waters wandered into a Billy Graham Crusade at Madison Square Garden in 1957…and walked out of it at peace, saved and transformed. She landed a couple of jobs after that - e.g., guest-starring on The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1957 and 1959 - but hitting the road for Billy Graham Crusades ultimately became her final act. Waters passed in 1977, besieged by a number of ailments, but probably as close to at peace as she’d ever been. For what it's worth, I'll never stop wondering how the Ethel Waters of, say, 1921-1935 would have seen her later life, something I'm not even sure her biographies addressed.
About the Sampler
Some of Ethel Waters’ most famous tunes appear both above and on the sampler, but, to catch some I left out, there’s also “Taking a Chance on Love,” “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” while Blackpast.org shouted out, “Memories of You,” “Porgy,” “Georgia on My Mind” and “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” While the sampler does include some of her famous work - I haven’t mentioned the lively, smokin' “Heat Wave” - a couple other songs caught my ear over the past week or so.
First, and most notably, Waters turned in one hell of a piece of social commentary with the haunting “Miss Otis Regrets.” There’s a movie in that masterpiece. Also, I did remember to get “Cabin in the Sky” on the sampler, one of her more famous tunes. I’d file the rest under songs that I either know - e.g., “I Got Rhythm” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” (and, for that matter “Come up and See Me Sometime”) - or that just had some quality I either liked or found representative. Ethel Waters left a massive catalog, so, rather than repeat the mistake of trying to listen to everything (like I did on Blind Lemon Jefferson), I picked through a couple collections and came out with, “Shadows on the Swanee,” “Careless Love,” “Moonglow” (I have a thing for “moon” themed songs), “Harlem on My Mind,” and “You Can’t Do What My Last Man Did.”
Unlike contemporaries like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (both covered earlier; hit those links if you’re curious), most of Waters’ material has decent sound quality. The sound doesn’t have the same blues inflection either - it’s more popular in tone. That worked for her, because the popular music from the 20s didn't fall out of style as abruptly and permanently as the "royalty of blues" material. Overall, most of Waters' sound listens like what you’d expect from the 1920s - up-tempo, a little racy (a lot here and there), but without the big, smooth sound of the coming big-band era.
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