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Ethel Waters

Vocalist and actress Ethel Waters (1896–1977) was a key figure in the development of African American culture between the two world wars. She broke barrier after barrier, becoming the first black woman heard on the radio, the first black singer to perform on television, the first African American to perform in an integrated cast on Broadway, and the first black woman to perform in a lead dramatic role on Broadway. As a singer Waters introduced over 50 songs that became hits, including standards of the magnitude of "St. Louis Blues" and "Stormy Weather." Her jazzy yet controlled vocal style influenced a generation of vocalists, black and white, and her career, encompassing stage, song, and screen, flowered several times in comebacks after tumbling to low points.

Today Waters is hardly ever mentioned in the same breath with other major African American performers of the1920s and 1930s. While the careers of jazz artists like Louis Armstrong or even her blues–singing contemporary Bessie Smith are exhaustively dissected by historians, Waters is remembered chiefly by listeners and performers with a special interest in the early years of the American popular song industry. Only a few reissues of her recordings have been made available on compact discs and online music services.

There are several reasons for this disparity, all of which can be reduced to the idea that Waters and her career could not easily be mythologized. Her field was pop, not the jazz or blues that has typically fascinated investigators of the American musical past, although she was touched creatively by both those genres. She lived and worked for decades, not dying the tragic death of Billie Holiday, a singer with a background similar to her own. And late in life she turned to gospel music, appearing with prominent conservative figures in an era when African American militancy was on the rise. "You don't become a jazz legend by growing old, playing grandmothers, and palling around with Billy Graham and Richard Nixon," noted singer Susannah McCorkle in an essay on Waters that appeared in American Heritage magazine.

Yet Waters overcame a childhood as bitterly hard as Armstrong's or Holiday's. She was conceived when her mother, 12 years old at the time, was raped at knifepoint. Born in Chester, Pennsylvania and growing up in and around nearby Philadelphia, she was raised by a grandmother and two alcoholic aunts, who abused her physically. She had neither a bed nor a bathtub and had vivid memories of opening closet doors only to come face to face with a rat on numerous occasions. By the time she was seven, Waters was serving as lookout for prostitutes and pimps in what she called Philadelphia's "Bloody Eighth Ward." "I played with the thieves' children and the sporting women's trick babies," Waters recalled in her autobiography, His Eye Is On the Sparrow. "It was they who taught me how to steal."

Some bright spots came in a Catholic school she began attending when she was nine; where nuns noticed her gifts for speaking and mimicry and her powerful memory (Waters called it "elephantine"). Waters married an older man named Merritt Purnsley in 1910. The marriage was abusive and ended after less than a year; she later married and divorced twice more, never had children, and rarely spoke of her marriages. As a teenager, Waters was often hired out by her grandmother as a housecleaner or chambermaid—jobs that seem dismal now, but for Waters seemed to open up a whole new world. She dreamed of being hired by a wealthy woman who would take her on travels around the world, and she would stand in front of mirrors in the houses she cleaned and do song-and-dance routines. Waters had already impressed Philadelphia churchgoers as a singer as far back as age five.

Performed as "Sweet Mama Stringbean"

In 1917 Waters entered a singing contest at a Philadelphia bar, and before long she had joined a touring vaudeville show led by a duo named Braxton and Nugent and was being paid ten dollars a week. Performing at first as part of a trio billed as the Hill Sisters, she soon connected with audiences as a soloist and was dubbed "Sweet Mama Stringbean." During this period she heard "St. Louis Blues," a composition by pioneering blues songwriter W.C. Handy, performed by a female impersonator and got Handy's permission to give the song its formal premiere at Baltimore's Lincoln Theater. Soon "St. Louis Blues" became her trademark, and even when she appeared in Atlanta with the great Bessie Smith, the crowd clamored for her to sing it. Even as she began to find success, Waters lacked confidence; she sometimes returned to manual-labor jobs so that she would have them to fall back on.

Touring the South was a necessity for black vaudeville troupes, for that was where the bulk of their audiences were to be found. But it could also be brutally dangerous. In Atlanta, Waters was almost lynched after a dispute over piano tuning. And after an auto accident in Anniston, Alabama, Waters had to plead for her life with passing white motorists who told her at first that they would rather see her die. She was taken to the segregated black ward of a nearby white-run hospital and basically left to die; oil and dirt that had become trapped in her leg wound were never removed. Gangrene threatened her with the loss of a leg, but she was finally removed from the hospital after the illegal intercession of a white nurse and treated by a nearby black surgeon.

To escape the hazardous life of touring vaudeville, Waters tried her luck in New York. Again uncertain of her skills, she quickly found work in black stage musicals and at Harlem nightclubs like Edmond's Cellar, where audiences demanded the racy double-meaning blues songs of the day. But at the urging of pianist Lou Henley she also applied her talents to more elegant pop songs of the day like Irving Berlin's "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." Her versatility got noticed at Black Swan, the top black-owned record label of the day, and the 26 sides she recorded there included "Down Home Blues" (the label's first big success) and other hits. Waters went back on the road, sometimes working with an orchestra led by future swing arranger and bandleader Fletcher Henderson and providing him with a crucial dose of blues feeling.

In 1924, again reluctant but urged on by Harlem performer Earl Dancer, Waters went to Chicago to try to break into the more lucrative world of white vaudeville. She was an immediate hit and followed up her success there with a run at New York's Plantation Club. Through the 1920s, Waters was a successful jazz vocalist, recording with the likes of Benny Goodman and the brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. Her greatest successes, however, still came on stage. She appeared on Broadway in several high-profile all-black musicals and toured the United States and Europe. Booked at Harlem's Cotton Club in the early 1930s, the focal point of New York's "black and tan" scene that drew white audiences to hear top African-American artists, Waters premiered "Stormy Weather," a new song by future Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen.

Joined Cast of Berlin Musical

Her interpretation of the song was soon the talk of New York, and songwriter Irving Berlin stopped in to hear it. He invited Waters to star in his new topical musical As Thousands Cheer, and in 1934 she became the first black star in an otherwise all-white musical cast. Berlin's show included "Supper Time," an anti-lynching song for Waters that prefigured the success of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" several years later. Waters followed up that success with another well-reviewed appearance in the revue At Home Abroad in 1935.

Wanting to stretch herself as an actress, Waters cut back on her singing in the late 1930s in favor of dramatic stage roles. In 1939 she starred in Mamba's Daughters, a play by Porgy and Bess lyricist DuBose Heyward, becoming the first black actress to star in a Broadway drama. Exhausted by the intensity of playing a character who reminded her of her own grandmother and of her own terrible childhood, Waters nevertheless looked back on the play's run (in an interview quoted by McCorkle) as "fourteen months of glory." She appeared in the musical Cabin in the Sky in 1940 and co-starred with Louis Armstrong and the young Lena Horne (a Waters disciple in many ways) in its film version two years later.

A nondrinker and nonsmoker, Waters dealt with the pressures of live theater by eating. Her weight ballooned to more than 300 pounds, and roles dried up. Nearly losing her California home, Waters was forced to appear wherever she could in minor nightclubs. But things turned around with her appearances as a grandmother in Pinky (1949), an Elia Kazan-directed film that brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

The following year, she agreed to appear in the Carson McCullers play The Member of the Wedding after the role of Berenice Sadie Brown was rewritten to give it a more religious orientation. Waters won a New York Drama Critics' Circle award for her performance, which included a rendition of the gospel hymn "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." The hymn's title became the name of her best-selling 1951 autobiography, which unsentimentally recounted the hellish trials of her early life. In 1952 the film version of The Member of the Wedding brought Waters another Oscar nomination.

Took Criticism for Maid Portrayal

Waters starred as a maid in the television series Beulah in 1950, becoming the first African-American to reach stardom in the new television medium. Civil rights organizations, growing in influence, criticized Waters for upholding the maid stereotypes that had often plagued blacks in Hollywood, but Waters, who had worked for years as a maid herself, maintained that there was no shame in playing one on screen. For much of the 1950s Waters steadily pulled in audiences as the star of her own one-woman show. But, living alone in an apartment in New York City, she felt isolated and unfulfilled.

In 1957, Waters attended a revival held at Madison Square Garden as part of the Billy Graham Crusade. She joined the Graham choir at first, then began to lend her gifts as a gospel soloist to Graham. After Waters announced that she had become a born-again Christian in 1957, her weight dropped from 380 to 160 pounds. Through Graham she met and became friends with Richard Nixon and his family, and she espoused politically conservative positions. "I'm not concerned with civil rights," Waters said in an interview quoted by McCorkle. "I'm only concerned with God-given rights, and they are available to everyone!"

Waters performed at the White House in 1971, returning the following year as a guest at the wedding of presidential daughter Tricia Nixon. She was also honored by Graham at a 1972 testimonial dinner attended by a galaxy of Hollywood stars. Her final appearance came at a Billy Graham Crusade event held in San Diego in August of 1976. She suffered from cataracts, heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure, and cancer, and finally died on September 1, 1977 at the home of future biographer Paul DeKorte. "Because of her trailblazing style, Waters deserves to be as widely listened to and loved as the jazz icons Bessie Smtih and Billie Holiday," McCorkle noted in 1994, and Waters was honored on a U.S. Postal Service commemmorative stamp that year. But a decade later historians were still just beginning to appreciate her accomplishments.

Books

Contemporary Musicians, volume 11, Gale, 1994.

Waters, Ethel, with Charles Samuels, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, Doubleday, 1951.

Periodicals

American Heritage, February-March 1994.

Online

"Ethel Waters," All Movie Guide, http:/www.allmovie.com (January 11, 2005).

"Ethel Waters," Harlem 1900-1940, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/text/ewaters.html (January 11, 2005).

"Ethel Waters," Red Hot Jazz, http://www.redhotjazz.com/waters.html (January 11, 2005).