Ethel Waters: October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Ethel Waters was a noted American blues, jazz and gospel vocalist and actress. She frequently performed jazz, big band, and pop music, on the Broadway stage and in concerts. She began her career in the 1920s singing blues.

Her best-known recordings includes, "Dinah", "Stormy Weather", "Am I Blue?", and "Cabin in the Sky", as well as her version of the spiritual "His Eye Is on the Sparrow".

Waters was the second African American (after Hattie McDaniel) to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Sex

With the writing help of Charles Samuels, Waters in 1952 published an autobiography, His Eye Is On The Sparrow, which is surprisingly frank for its time about sexuality.

Waters says that by the time she was seven "I knew all about sex and life in the raw and could outcurse any stevadore," and took "sadistic pleasure" in shocking everyone with her lurid vocabulary.

Waters adds:

In crowded slum homes one’s sex education begins very early indeed. Mine began when I was about three and sleeping in the same room, often in the same bed, with my aunts and my transient ‘uncles’. I wasn’t fully aware of what was going on but resented it. By the time I was seven I was repelled by every aspect of sex.

As a young girl, Waters says, “Sex didn’t interest me. There was nothing about it I didn’t know.”

Waters explains that she was inexperienced sexually with men but maintained a misleading worldly exterior:

Though I had no desire to lose my virginity, I also was determined to maintain my respected position as a worldly girl. However, I could foresee that the day might come soon when [my use of] vulgar words and my intimate knowledge of the sex lives of other people might get me by.

Of her marriage at age 13 to Merrit ("Buddy") Purnsley, Water's says:

Having seen so much of the ugly side of life as a little girl, I dreaded the sex relationship. Yet I knew that sex had to happen to me as to everyone else. My wedding night, however, couldn’t have been nastier or more unpleasant.

Sexual Orientation

The biography of Waters by Donald Bogle contains the following information about Waters' sexual orientation:

"She was a lesbian," said [Water's friend and confidant Jane] Coomes. "She told me that she was the best that ever did it. She told me that." Once she showed Croomes a picture of herself "dressed in men's clothes," said Croomes. "She had pants and a jacket, and she had short hair." "This was when I was a boy," said Ethel.

Bogle concludes: "Clearly, Ethel had no hang-ups about her sexuality. Nor did it conflict with her religious beliefs. That [being a lesbian], as far as she was concerned, was who she was. Her Lord understood."

Bogle also says that Waters had relations with and loved some men. Her "sex education began at the age of three", when, as she said, she slept "in the same room, often in the same bed with my aunts and transient 'uncles.' I was fully aware of what was going on."

Bogle adds that though Waters publicly "professed to have no interest in sex, there was nothing about it that she didn’t know by the age of seven. As a young woman, she also enjoyed going to the drag shows, where female impersonators were dressed in high fashion. Throughout her life, she would always view sex rather casually and without moral judgments.”

Early exposed to homosexual as well as heterosexual relationships, “she never considered one type of sexual liaison more moral than another”, says Bogle.

In 1929, Waters went to France and recalls in His Eye Is On The Sparrow, her autobiogrpahy of 1952: "I met a lot of people in Paris, and Radclyffe Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness, was the most interesting of them.” Via that throwaway line, Waters was daringly dropping public clues to her own sexual life.

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Early life

Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania on October 31, 1896, as a result of her mother's rape at age 13.[1]

As she wrote in an autobiography, Waters was raised in a violent, impoverished home. She never lived in the same place for more than 15 months. She said of her difficult childhood, "I never was a child. I never was cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family."

Despite this unpromising start, Waters demonstrated early the love of language that so distinguishes her work. Moreover, according to Rosetta Reitz, the historian of women-in-jazz, Waters' birth in the North and her peripatetic life exposed her to many cultures. For the rest of her life, this lent to her interpretation of southern blues a unique sensibility that pulled in eclectic influences from across American music.

Waters married at the age of 13, but soon left her abusive husband and became a maid in a Philadelphia hotel working for $4.75 per week.

On Halloween night in 1913, she attended a costume party at a nightclub on Juniper Street and was persuaded to sing two songs. She impressed the audience so much that she was offered professional work at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland.[2]

She later recalled that she earned the rich sum of ten dollars a week, but her managers cheated her out of the tips her admirers threw on the stage.

Career

After her start in Baltimore, Waters toured on the black vaudeville circuit. As she described it later, "I used to work from nine until unconscious."[3]

Despite her early success, she fell on hard times and joined a carnival, traveling in freight cars along the carnival circuit, eventually reaching Chicago. Waters enjoyed her time with the carnival and recalled, "the roustabouts and the concessionaires were the kind of people I'd grown up with, rough, tough, full of larceny towards strangers, but sentimental and loyal to their friends and co-workers."

She soon headed south to Atlanta. There, she worked in the same club with Bessie Smith, who demanded that Waters not compete in singing blues opposite her. Waters conceded to the veteran blues headliner and instead sang ballads and popular songs, and danced. Perhaps today best known for her blues voice, Waters then was to sing, dance, play and star in musicals, plays and movies, and later in TV; but, she returned to singing blues whenever the opportunity allowed.

Waters loved a drug addict during this early period, but she ended the destructive relationship sometime before World War I. Around 1919, she moved to Harlem and there became a celebrity performer in the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s.

Waters obtained her first Harlem job at Edmond's Cellar, a club that had a black patronage. She specialized in popular ballads and became an actress in a blackface comedy called Hello 1919.

Jazz historian Rosetta Reitz points out that by the time Waters returned to Harlem in 1921, women blues singers were among the most powerful entertainers in the country.

In 1921, Waters became the fifth black woman to make a record, on the tiny Cardinal Records label. She later joined Black Swan Records, where Fletcher Henderson was her accompanist. Waters later commented that Henderson tended to perform in a more classical style than she would prefer, often lacking "the damn-it-to-hell bass." According to Waters, she influenced Henderson to practice in a "real jazz" style. She recorded with Black Swan from 1921 through 1923.

Early in 1924, Paramount bought the Black Swan label, and she stayed with Paramount through 1924. Waters then first recorded for Columbia Records in 1925, achieving a hit with her voicing of "Dinah" (a recording voted a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1998). In 1924, Waters played at the Plantation Club on Broadway.

In the mid-1920s Waters started working with Pearl Wright, and together they toured in the South. She also toured with the Black Swan Dance Masters.

With Earl Dancer, she joined what was called the "white time" Keith Vaudeville Circuit, a traditional white-audience based vaudeville circuit combined with screenings of silent movies. They received rave reviews in Chicago and earned the unheard of salary of US$1,250 in 1928. In 1929, Harry Akst helped Wright and Waters compose a version of "Am I Blue?," her signature tune.

Although she was considered a blues singer during the pre-1925 period, Waters belonged to the Vaudeville-style style similar to Mamie Smith, Viola McCoy, and Lucille Hegamin. While with Columbia, she introduced many popular standards including "Dinah", "Heebie Jeebies", "Sweet Georgia Brown", "Someday, Sweetheart", "Am I Blue?" and "(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue".

During the 1920s, Waters performed and was recorded with the ensembles of Will Marion Cook and Lovie Austin. As her career continued, she evolved toward being a blues and Broadway singer, performing with artists such as Duke Ellington.

She remained with Columbia through 1931. She then signed with Brunswick in 1932 and remained until 1933 when she went back to Columbia. She signed with Decca in late 1934 for only two sessions, as well as a single session in early 1938. She recorded for the specialty label "Liberty Music Shops" in 1935 and again in 1940. Between 1938 and 1939, she recorded for Bluebird.

In 1933, Waters made a satirical all-black film entitled Rufus Jones for President, which featured then-child performer Sammy Davis Jr. as Rufus Jones. She went on to star at the Cotton Club, where, according to her autobiography, she "sang 'Stormy Weather' from the depths of the private hell in which I was being crushed and suffocated."

She took a role in the Broadway musical revue As Thousands Cheer in 1933, where she was the first black woman in an otherwise white show. She had three gigs at this point; in addition to the show, she starred in a national radio program and continued to work in nightclubs. She was the highest paid performer on Broadway at the time.

MGM hired Lena Horne as the ingenue in the all-Black musical Cabin in the Sky, and Waters starred as Petunia in 1942, reprising her stage role of 1940. The film, directed by Vincente Minnelli, was a success, but Waters, offended by the adulation accorded Horne and feeling her age, went into something of a decline.

She began to work with Fletcher Henderson again in the late 1940s. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 1949 for the film Pinky.

In 1950, she won the New York Drama Critics Award for her performance opposite Julie Harris in the play The Member of the Wedding. Waters and Harris repeated their roles in the 1952 film version of Member of the Wedding.

In 1950, Waters starred in the television series Beulah but quit after complaining that the scripts' portrayal of African-Americans was "degrading." She later guest starred in 1957 and 1959 on NBC's show starring Tennessee Ernie Ford. In the 1957 episode, she sang "Cabin in the Sky."[4]

Despite these successes, her brilliant career was fading. She lost tens of thousands in jewelry and cash in a robbery, and the IRS hounded her. Her health suffered, and she worked only sporadically in following years.

In 1950-51 she wrote the autobiography His Eye is on the Sparrow, with Charles Samuels. (It later was adapted for a stage production in which she was portrayed by Ernestine Jackson.) In it, she talks candidly about her life. She also explains why her age has often been misstated, saying that her mother had to sign a paper saying she was four years older than she was. She states she was born in 1896. In her second autobiography, To Me, It's Wonderful, Waters states that she was born in 1900.[5]

Rosetta Reitz called Waters "a natural". Her "songs are enriching, nourishing. You will want to play them over and over again, idling in their warmth and swing. Though many of them are more than 50 years old, the music and the feeling are still there."

Private life

Waters is the great-aunt of Dance music singer and songwriter Crystal Waters. In the period before her death in Los Angeles, California, she toured with The Reverend Billy Graham, despite the fact that she had once been a Catholic and he was a Protestant.[6] She died in 1977 at the age of 80 from heart disease, at the Chatsworth, California, home of a young couple who cared for her.

Awards and honors

Grammy Hall of Fame

Recordings of Ethel Waters were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five yrs old, and that have "qualitative or historical significance."

Ethel Waters: Grammy Hall of Fame Award
Year Recorded	Title	Genre	Label	Year Inducted
1929	"Am I Blue?"	Traditional Pop (Single)	Columbia	2007
1933	"Stormy Weather" (Keeps Rainin' All The Time)	Jazz (Single)	Brunswick	2003
1925	"Dinah"	Traditional Pop (Single)	Columbia	1998

National Recording Registry

Waters' recording of "Stormy Weather" (1933) was honored by the Library of Congress. It was listed in the National Recording Registry in 2004.

Legacy

Year	Title	Organization	Result	Notes
2007	Christian Music Hall of Fame		Inducted
1994	29 cents Commemorative stamp	U.S. Postal Service	Honoree	Photo (Scott #2851)
1983	Gospel Music Hall of Fame		Inducted
1962	Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Series	Emmy Awards	Nominee	Route 66 "Goodnight Sweet Blues"
1949	Best Supporting Actress	Academy Award	Nominee	Pinky (film)

Hollywood Walk of Fame

Waters was approved for a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. However, the actual Star has not been funded, and as of late-2011, public fundraising efforts continue.

Filmography

Features:

• On with the Show (1929)
• Gift of Gab (1934)
• Tales of Manhattan (1942)
• Cairo (1942)
• Cabin in the Sky (1943)
• Stage Door Canteen (1943)
• Pinky (1949)
• The Member of the Wedding (1952)
• Carib Gold (1957)
• The Heart Is a Rebel (1958)
• The Sound and the Fury (1959)

Short Subjects:

• Rufus Jones for President (1933)
• Bubbling Over (1934)
• Route 66 (1962) Goodnight Sweet Blues

Further reading

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• Bogle, Donald (2011). Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters. New York: HarperCollins.
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Harlem Godfather: The Rap on my Husband, Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson (Paperback) by Mayme Hatcher Johnson (Author), Karen E. Quinones Miller (Author) (ISBN 978-0967602837)

External links

• Ethel Waters at the African American Registry
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• Ethel Waters discography
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References

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