LEST WE FORGET ETHEL WATERS
   (Ocrober 31, 1896 - September 1, 1976)

She was the first black actress to star on Broadway in a dramatic play as Hagar in Mamba's Daughters by
Dorothy and DuBose Heyward (January 3, 1939)


In her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow (1951) she wrote the following:
           "I never was a child.
            I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.
            I never felt I belonged.
            I was always an outsider...."
She was born in Chester, Pennsylvania to a mother who was thirteen when she was raped by her father John Waters.  Ethel was raised by her grandmother, Sally Anderson, a housemaid.  Ethel worked at various jobs including chores at local brothels, cleaning hotel rooms, and washing dishes. And even after her professional career had begun, her dream was to become a lady's maid and companion to some wealthy woman who would take her on her travels around the world.

EARLY CAREER--"Sweet Mama Stringbean"
     Her show business career began in a Philadelphia nightclub in 1911.  On a tour with the Hill Sisters, she became the first woman to sing the W. C. Handy classic "St. Louis Blues" at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore in 1913.  After working on the carnival circuit she headed south to Atlanta where she worked in the same club with Bessie Smith.  Smith demanded that Waters not compete in singing blues opposite her.  She conceded and sang ballads and popular songs.  In 1919 she moved to Harlem and became a celebrity performer in the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s.  In 1921 she became the fifth black woman to make a record, on tiny Cardinal Records label, later joined Black Swan Records which became Paramount and later recorded for Columbia records in 1925, achieving a hit with "Dinah".  She joined what she called the "white time" Keith Vaudeville Circuit, earning as much as $1250 a week.

 After many years of performing as a singer (during which she became well known for "shimmying" as well as for her vocal abilities) she appeared on Broadway in Dancer and Africana, an all-black revue for which she received an excellent notice in Variety.
       As a result, she appeared in Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1930 and Rhapsody in Black (1931).

STARDOM

As Thousands Cheer (Bruehl)

Upon hearing her sing "Stormy Weather" at Harlem's Cotton Club,
Irving Berlin invited her to play in his Broadway show As Thousands Cheer (1933) with Clifton Webb, Marilyn Miller, and Helen Broderick, making her the first black performer in an otherwise all-white cast to appear on Broadway.  The show featured her singing "Suppertime," the dirge of a black woman who is preparing dinner for her family on the day that her husband has been lynched, the first such song to reach such a wide audience. She remained in the hit show for two years (1933-1935) and it was the vehicle that carried her to stardom. When the show appeared in the South, she became the first black to co-star with whites on the Southern stage.  Between 1935 and 1936 she co-starred with Beatrice Lillie in At Home Abroad directed by Vincente Minnelli.   In spite of her success she received no further offers to perform as an actress until she created the role of Hagar in Mamba's Daughters, who bore similarities to her mother.

With Lena Horne in
Cabin in the Sky

MGM hired Lena Horne as the ingenue in the all-Black musical
Cabin in the Sky (1942) with Ethel reprising her stage role as Petunia. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, the film was a success. Other motion pictures included Tales of Manhattan (1942) with Paul Robeson and Stage Door Canteen (1943).  Though still in demand as a singer, she received little attention as an actress.

However in 1949 she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for the film Pinky, directed by Elia Kazan after John Ford quit, due to his disagreements with Ms. Waters.  In 1950, she won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for her performance in The Member of the Wedding opposite Julie Harris. Both actresses repeated their roles  in the 1952 film version. She was nominated for an Oscar for the same role.  ( Ethel Waters and Julie Harris, photo: Bob Colby)

During preproduction consultations Waters had insisted as a condition for accepting the role that Carson McCullers alter the character of the maid. Carson agreed that Waters could bring "God" and "hopefulness" to the character, qualities that were missing from both the novel and the play. Langston Hughes said of her performance: "She gave an additional human dimension to the conventional 'Mammy' of old--one of both dignity and gentleness--endeared her to theatregoers without the use on stage of the handkerchief-head dialect and broad humor of former days. In her portrayals of illiterate Negro mothers of the South, Ethel Waters was a mistress of the 'laughter through tears' technique which she brought to perfection in her highly hailed performance of Berenice....."(Black Magic).

Despite brilliant successes, her career was fading. She lost tens of thousands in jewelry and cash in a robbery, and had difficulties with the IRS.  Her health suffered, and she worked only sporadically in following years.   In her autobiography, His Eye is on The Sparrow, with Charles Samuels, she wrote candidly about her life. It was adapted for a stage production in which she was portrayed by Ernestine Jackson.

In the twilight of her career she played a few guest spots on television and was the star of the first "Beulah" series.

She was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame,
The Christian Music Hall of Fame and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and she is on the 29 cents Commemorative stamp (Photo: Scott #2851)

Women-in-jazz historian and archivist Rosetta Reitz called Ethel 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."




Resources and References:  Wikipedia.
Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989 Elizabeth Hadley Freydberg
Waters, Ethel. His Eye Is on the Sparrow (1951)
Bogle, Donald.  Chapter "Ethel Watsrs: Sweet Mama Goes Legit" in
Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of America's Black Female Superstars (1980)
Hughes, Langston and Milton Meltzer. Black Magic: A Pictorial History of Black Entertainers
in America. 1967