Ethel Waters

Library of Congress,
Prints & Photographs Division

Ethel Waters was born on October 31, 1896. In her first autobiography, His Eye Is On the Sparrow (1950) she claimed she was born in 1900 but in her second life story, To Me It’s Wonderful (1972), she admitted, “I was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, delivered by a Polish midwife in the year 1896. Not 1900 as reported in my previous book but 1896.” Waters, a child of rape, was born to an African-American mother Louise Anderson and a white man named John Waters.

Ethel Waters learned more from the streets than she did at home and grew to be tall and slender, while living in the poor communities in Chester and Philadelphia. Water’s mother arranged a marriage for Ethel when she was only 13 years old but the union did not last. Waters had little education and moved from one menial job to another. She learned to sing and dance informally with her friends and, because of her height, she was able to get into nightclubs long before she became of age. When black vaudeville groups toured the country and Waters had the opportunity to see some of them perform.

With her soft and sultry voice, Waters often performed for friends. At a Halloween party in 1917, her friends encouraged her to sing in a talent contest. She did not dance; she just quietly crooned the song “When You’re a Long, Long Way from Home,” to the delight of the audience. Vaudeville producers, Braxton and Nugent, heard her perform and offered her a job touring with them for ten dollars a week. She was making only four dollars and fifty cents a week as a chambermaid and laundress but was afraid to leave steady work. However, she accepted the offer when her mother promised to take over her job.

Water's first professional engagement was in 1917 at the Lincoln Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore. She found a dress at a local second hand store and was about to launch her vaudeville career as “Sweet Mama Stringbean.” Braxton and Nugent received permission for her to perform “St. Louis Blues.” Waters described Lincoln Theater as old and dilapidated, and her audience as rambunctious. Her act began feigning an argument with Nugent who walked out on her. She sat dejectedly and began to sing “St. Louis Blues” slowly and softly. The vaudeville audience was used to loud and powerful deliveries, so Waters’ style was new to them. Nevertheless, Waters wrote, “You could have heard a pin drop in that rough, rowdy audience out in front.” She said that when she finished, “the money fell like rain on the stage.”

Unable to believe that her audiences really liked her, Waters would take off her make up and go into the lobby to hear audience comments as they left the theater. After the successful two-week run in Baltimore, Waters overheard Braxton and Nugent arguing over how much of her stage money each of them should keep. When she realized that they were cheating her, she quit their show as did two other performers, Maggie and Jo Hill, who joined her on the vaudeville circuit.

In 1919, Waters moved to New York and started her career as a recording artist. She sang jazz and blues, becoming more of a pop singer by the mid-1920s. Soon, Waters nurtured an acting career and was in the spotlight with other black entertainers of the time. She appeared in the Broadway musical review As Thousands Cheer (1933), singing the popular Irving Berlin tune “Heat Wave” and the poignant “Suppertime,” about a woman’s coming to terms with her husband’s absence because he has been lynched.

Waters starred in both the Broadway musical (1940) and the first all-black movie cast of “Cabin in the Sky” (1943) as the character Petunia. Nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role in Pinky in 1949, she won the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Actress in 1950. In later years, Waters toured with evangelist Billy Graham. Ethel Waters died in 1977 in California.

Waters, Ethel with Charles Samuels. Preface by Donald Bogle. His Eye is On the Sparrow. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.

Waters, Ethel. Introduction by Eugenia Price and Joyce Blackburn. To Me It’s Wonderful. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

Harlem, 1900-1940 site. From The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library. Under “Exhibition,” go to “Arts” and select topic. http://www.si.umich.edu/chico/Harlem/text/ewaters.html