Ethel Waters

Ethel Waters’ career as a performer began one Halloween night - she was asked to sing at a nightclub in Philadelphia on Juniper Street. After performing, Ethel was hired as a singer and billed as “Sweet Mama Stringbean” because of her lanky body. Although she began touring with a group called the Hill girls, eventually she decided to go solo. While touring, Ethel performed “The St. Louis Blues” at the Lincoln Theater in Baltimore and was a huge success. Despite facing many racial obstacles, such as Jim Crow laws in both Northern and Southern cities, Ethel’s popularity increased. She found work in Harlem at some popular hangouts - Edmond Johnson’s, the Cotton Club, as well as the Plantation Club where she made her first big hit of “Dinah”. Ethel then made her way up to white nightclubs at the Embassy Club in New York City. Ethel even replaced the popular performer Florence Mills in 1924 when Mills went on tour. Ethel recorded with Columbia Records for nearly ten years and sold 118,000 copies of her song “Oh Daddy/Down Home Blues”.

    Ethel made her first appearance in a white theater in Chicago in 1924. In 1939, Ethel became the first Negro woman to star in a dramatic play on Broadway. At the Empire Theatre, Ethel played the part of Hagar in Mamba’s Daughters even though she hated the role. Ethel felt that she had shown audiences all what it is to be a colored woman, dumb, ignorant, all boxed up and feeling everything with such intenseness that she is half crazy (Knaack, 30). In 1950, she received a dramatic part of the cook in The Member of the Wedding and received the New York Drama Critics Award. Ethel was nominated for an Academy Award for the best supporting role of the film version in 1955. In the play and the movie she sang “His Eye is on the Sparrow” and the song became her trademark.

When she was 80 years old, she had cancer. She suffered from heart failure , congestive heart trouble, heart failure, ulcers, diabetes which had caused partial blindness, and a tumor referred to the doctors as “the size of a volleyball” (Knaack, 13). Today, scholars overlook Waters because of the fact that they see her more of a “torch singer” than a genuine blues or jazz singer (Fabre and Feith, 113). Many people think of her as “white sounding”. Her works are more subjected to criticism nowadays.

  Florence Mills and Ethel Waters lived their lives to leave a legacy in music and acting.  Being born women and black in America already gave them a label of being inferior in society.  Florence Mills performed all of the United States as well as Paris and London. Mills left a legacy as being one of the successful entertainers in the 1920s performing on Broadway, making her famous among Blacks and Whites.  Ethel Waters was well known for her music and acting.  She played among the best black clubs such as the Cotton Club as well as the white clubs such as the Embassy Club. Today most people view Waters music as “white sounding” and is more criticized than praised. Despite all of the struggles of being entertainers, these two women transcended the negative stereotypes of being black and the perpetual struggle of being a woman in a male dominant society.