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Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania on October 31, 1896 as a result of the rape of her teenaged mother, Louise Anderson by pianist and family acquaintance John Waters. Raised in poverty and never living in the same place for more than 15 months she had a difficult childhood.

Waters grew tall, standing 5’9½” in her teens, 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 her 17th birthday, she attended a costume party at a nightclub on Juniper Street and persuaded to sing two songs, she impressed the audience so much that she was offered professional work at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland.

After Baltimore, Ethel toured on the black vaudeville circuit but success fell on hard times and she joined a carnival. Leaving that life in Chicago she headed to Atlanta, working the same clubs with Bessie Smith, singing ballads and popular songs instead of blues. But fame found her after her move to Harlem and its renaissance in the 1920s. She landed her first club gig in Harlem at Edmond’s Cellar, became an actress in the blackface comedy “Hello 1919”, and in 1921 became the fifth black woman to make a record, on the tiny Cardinal Records label. She later joined the Black Swan Record label where Fletcher Henderson was her accompanist.

She recorded for numerous labels over her career, played untold clubs and tours throughout the U.S. introducing standards like Dinah, Sweet Georgia Brown, Am I Blue and Black and Blue and worked with Duke Ellington. Film wooed her in 1933 with Rufus Jones for President featuring child star Sammy Davis Jr. in the title role. She went on to star at the Cotton Club singing Stormy Weather, had a featured role in the wildly successful Irving Berlin Broadway musical revue As Thousands Cheer in 1933, where she was the first black woman in an otherwise white show introducing Heat Wave and Supper Time to the world and was the highest paid performer on Broadway. In 1942 she starred in the Vincent Minnelli directed success Cabin In The Sky, reprising her 1940 stage role as Petunia.

Ethel Waters has three songs in the Grammy Hall of Fame, her version of Stormy Weather is on the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, was nominated for an Emmy for her performance in Route 66, was the second Black woman to be nominated for an Oscar for her role in Pinky, has a star approved but not funded on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, has written two autobiographies – His Eye is on the Sparrow and To Me, It’s Wonderful. The blues, jazz and gospel vocalist and actress passed away on September 1, 1977, aged 80, from uterine cancer, kidney failure, and other ailments in Chatsworth, California.

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