(22 greatest hits by Ethel Waters
Ethel Waters (October 3...)
22 greatest hits by Ethel Waters
Ethel Waters (October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977) was an American blues, jazz and gospel vocalist and actress.
She frequently performed jazz, big band, and pop music, on the Broadway stage and in concerts, although she began her career in the 1920s singing blues.
Her best-known recordings include "Dinah," "Stormy Weather," "Taking a Chance on Love," "Heat Wave," "Supper Time," "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. She is also the first African-American woman to be nominated for an Emmy Award, in 1962.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
(Autobigraphy of the late black vocal artist Ethel Walters...)
Autobigraphy of the late black vocal artist Ethel Walters. She became an important member of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Team as she shared her faith through the singing of Gospel music.
(22 great hits by Ethel Waters.
Ethel Waters (October 31,...)
22 great hits by Ethel Waters.
Ethel Waters (October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977) was an American blues, jazz and gospel vocalist and actress.
She frequently performed jazz, big band, and pop music, on the Broadway stage and in concerts, although she began her career in the 1920s singing blues.
Her best-known recordings include "Dinah," "Stormy Weather," "Taking a Chance on Love," "Heat Wave," "Supper Time," "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. She is also the first African-American woman to be nominated for an Emmy Award, in 1962.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
His Eye Is On The Sparrow: An Autobiography (Quality Paperbacks Series)
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"Here is a remarkable chronicle of the life and career ...)
"Here is a remarkable chronicle of the life and career of an extraordinary woman who had a major impact on American entertainment. With astonishing candor, Ethel Waters tells her dramatic and dazzling story: from a childhood of abject poverty, to her early success in Black vaudeville, to her rise into the top ranks of stardom with her memorable performances in Cabin in the Sky, Pinky, and The Member of the Wedding. Hers is both an engrossing record of a topsy-turvy career and, just as importantly, an invaluable social document that traces the changing landscape for African American entertainers in the first half of the twentieth century. One of our very best show-business memoirs, brimming with insights, humor, and an unbreakable spirit, His Eye Is on the Sparrow was a significant groundbreaker when first published in 1951--and remains an authentic American classic today."--Donald Bogle
Ethel Waters's His Eye Is on the Sparrow stands as perhaps the greatest autobiography of a black female performer, capturing both the horror and the joy of the African American woman's experience through the often bitter yet always forgiving voice of an indomitable spirit. This edition is supplemented with a new historical preface and over a dozen photographs.
Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pa. , the daughter of Louise Anderson, who was raped at knifepoint at the age of twelve by John Waters. Her father, whom she never knew, was murdered by poison when Waters was three. She had a half sister, born to her mother in a later marriage, and perhaps as many as three half brothers from her father, by Waters's own account. Raised by her maternal grandmother, Sally Anderson, and living sometimes with two aunts whom she described as sometimes abusive alcoholics, Waters had an early childhood marked by constant moving that fostered toughness and street smartness. Sally Anderson found occasional employment as a live-in housekeeper and cleaning woman but was often unable to feed and house herself and Waters properly. Nevertheless, her faith and personal strength influenced Waters, and she remembered her grandmother's example throughout her life. Growing up in the slums and red-light districts of Philadelphia and its outlying areas, Waters was no stranger to desperation. She learned to fend for herself early on, occasionally stealing food to keep from going hungry. Her friends and acquaintances included the neighborhood prostitutes and petty thieves. Her grandmother, a devout Catholic, enrolled Waters, at age nine, in a multiracial Catholic school in Philadelphia. The nuns inspired awe, respect, and a lifelong love of God that sometimes stood in stark contrast to her daily existence.
Career
Waters began working in hotels and apartment houses as a chambermaid and waitress. In her autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, she recalled that her dream was to become the personal maid and companion of a wealthy woman who would take her around the world; she also fantasized about being a star of the stage. On October 31, 1917, Waters sang at a local Philadelphia nightclub, Jack's Rathskeller. She was soon hired, billed as Sweet Mama Stringbean - "They called me that, " she said, "because of my lissome and willowy form. " Urged on by Braxton and Nugent, a successful vaudeville team, she began singing and dancing at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore with Maggie and Jo Hill, as the third member of the Hill Sisters. At this time she obtained permission from W. C. Handy to perform his "St. Louis Blues, " a much-requested song and one of many that she made famous. Later successes included "Dinah, " "Takin' a Chance on Love, " and "Stormy Weather. " During World I, the Hill Sisters and Sweet Mama Stringbean played vaudeville clubs and carnivals in Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Savannah, and small towns in the South and Midwest. They encountered the viciousness of Jim Crow laws in both the North and the South, as well as the resentment of southern blacks. While playing in Birmingham, Ala. , Waters met the great black performers of the day - Ma Rainey, Legge McGinty, Alice Ramsey, and others, many of whom she had seen years before at the Standard Theater in Philadelphia. When Waters returned to Philadelphia after the breakup of the Hill Sisters and a year on the road, she had a two-week engagement at the Standard Theater, the city's premier showcase for black performers; only a few years before, she had "watched shows from the peanut gallery" there. In those early years, her blues singing was her trademark. Waters moved to New York City and found work singing at Edmond's Cellar and other small clubs in Harlem, and at Rafe's Paradise in Atlantic City, N. J. She recorded "Down Home Blues" and "Oh, Daddy" on the Black Swan label, a record followed by a number of other popular blues hits that led to a tour with Fletcher Henderson's Black Swan Jazz Masters. Waters later recorded with Benny Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and other white musicians on the Columbia label. In the summer of 1924 she filled in for the black singing star Florence Mills at Sam Salvin's Plantation Club on Broadway, alongside Josephine Baker and Bessie Allison. Although Waters won praise for her renditions of classic blues songs, she declined the opportunity to play Paris, an offer that Josephine Baker accepted. Waters's first Broadway appearance was in the all-black revue Africana (1927), which then toured the Midwest. She next appeared in Lew Leslie's 1930 production Blackbirds and, following an eight-month tour of Europe that included performances in Paris and at the Palladium in London, she starred in the 1931 revue Rhapsody in Black. Her first movie, On with the Show, was released in 1929. In the early 1930's the Cotton Club in Harlem featured such well-known black performers as Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. Waters's rendition there of "Stormy Weather" caught the attention of Irving Berlin, who cast her in his musical As Thousands Cheer, a highly successful hit in which she became the first black performer in an otherwise all-white cast and the highest-paid woman on Broadway. In 1935 she costarred with Beatrice Lillie in the Shubert show At Home Abroad, which ran at the Winter Garden and (in 1936) at the Majestic. This success was followed by Mamba's Daughters, which opened to critical acclaim in January 1939 at the Empire Theatre. In it, Waters was the first black actress to star on Broadway in a dramatic role. As Petunia Jackson in Cabin in the Sky (1940), Waters sang "Takin' a Chance on Love. " The play subsequently went on the road and in 1943 was made into a movie starring Waters, Lena Horne, and Louis Armstrong. Waters also appeared in the film Cairo (1942). Despite a string of successful plays, films, and recordings, by the late 1940's Waters found little work, was plagued by financial troubles, and fought to keep from losing her home in California by accepting minor bookings. But by 1948 she was back in Hollywood, filming the Twentieth Century-Fox production of Pinky (1949), directed by Elia Kazan. For her portrayal of Granny in this story of the troubles of a black girl who passes for white, Waters won an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Before the release of Pinky, Waters was approached to star in the Carson McCullers play The Member of the Wedding. At first she objected to the story because "there was no God in this play. " When the producers allowed her to give the role of Berenice Sadie Brown her own interpretation, she signed a contract. Julie Harris was cast to play Frankie, the thirteen-year-old heroine. The play opened on Broadway at the Empire Theatre, to universal acclaim, on January 5, 1950, and had a long run before being made into a movie in 1952. Waters received the New York Drama Critics Award for her stage appearance in Member. She sang her signature song, "His Eye Is on the Sparrow, " a hymn taught to her by her grandmother, and the title of her first autobiography, in the play. During the 1950's and 1960's, Waters appeared frequently in the one-woman show An Evening with Ethel Waters, despite her great size (at one point she weighed almost 350 pounds and moved with difficulty). She was in the film The Sound and the Fury (1959) and had a number of small roles on television shows. A turning point in Waters's life came in 1957 when, while on tour, she was invited to the Billy Graham Crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York City. She soon took an active role in Graham's crusades, marking a transformation in her spiritual and professional life by singing in the Crusade choir. In a long career as a singer and an actress that began in the honky-tonk clubs of black America and ended in Christian evangelist crusades with mainly white audiences, Waters had a large and devoted following. She is remembered as much for the obstacles she overcame as for her contributions to twentieth-century American culture. She died in Chatsworth, Calif. , at the home of friends.
In April 1910, at the age of thirteen, Waters married Merritt ("Buddy") Purnsley, ten years her senior; they had no children. The marriage, approved by her mother, with whom she had had little contact, was characterized by physical abuse and lasted less than a year. A number of years later she married and divorced Edward Mallory; they had no children.