“When you dominate other people’s emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.”
TRQ: Ethel Waters, Died September 1, 1977
Singer and actress Ethel Waters, the first African American to star in her own television show, was born on October 31, 1896 in Chester, Pennsylvania. She was the product of rape. Pianist John Waters assaulted her mother Louise Anderson in her late teens.
Married at the age 13, Waters describes her tough childhood in her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow (1950). “I never was a child… I just ran wild as a little girl. I was bad, always a leader of the street gang in stealing and general hell-raising. By the time I was seven, I knew all about sex and life in the raw. I could out-curse any stevedore and took a sadistic pleasure in shocking people.”
She left her abusive husband and worked as a hotel maid in Philadelphia. She sang for the first time from behind a mask at a nightclub on Halloween. Afterwards, Waters performed professionally in Philadelphia, in Baltimore at the Lincoln Theatre before joining a traveling carnival and then the Harlem Renaissance in 1920s New York.
The movement celebrated Black artistic achievement and identity and adopted an openness to sexual diversity. Waters made a name for herself by singing blues standards such as “Stormy Weather,” “Dinah,” and “Heat Wave.”
Like blues singers Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Alberta Hunter, Waters had sexual relationships with other women. She was publicly involved with dancer Ethel Williams, and mentions her relationship with novelist Radclyffe Hall in her autobiography.
Waters approached singing with a dramatic intensity, which she challenged into musical theatre. In the late 1920s, Waters acted on Broadway and gradually moved into dramatic film roles. By the 1930s, Waters was the highest-paid performer on Broadway. Critics praised her performances in the plays Blackbirds (1930) and Mamba’s Daughters (1938). She appeared alongside Sammy Davis Jr. in the all-Black film Rufus Jones for President (1933).
In her autobiography, she describes singing “Stormy Weather” at the Cotton Club, “from the depths of the private hell in which was being crushed and suffocated.”
In 1939, Water launched her own The Ethel Waters Show. Not long afterwards Waters moved to Los Angeles to film Cairo in 1942. Next she appeared in the all-Black Cabin in the Sky musical, and sang “Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe,” which was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1949, she earned an Oscar nomination for her supporting role in Pinky. She received a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Actress for her role as the maid in Member of the Wedding. Her guest role in Route 66 earned her an Emmy nomination, a first four Black women. In 1950 she starred in Beulah, the first nationally broadcast weekly television series with a Black actor in the leading role. It aired from 1950 to 1952.
In 1955, Waters had trouble with the IRS, which seized her royalties to pay off outstanding tax debts. Despite her poor health, she began touring with Billy Graham after his Billy Graham Crusade in Madison Square Gardens.
On September 1, 1977, Ethel Waters died from uterine cancer and kidney failure. She was 80 years old.
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