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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 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.
