[Dixielandjazz] "Sweet Mama Stringbean" previewed

[Robert Ringwald]

'Sweet Mama Stringbean'
ValLimar and Frank Jansen celebrate the blues and trailblazing career of Ethel Waters
at Fremont Centre Theatre
by Bliss
Pasadena Weekly, December 16, 2010

She was a star at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the first
African-American women nominated for an Academy Award. Harold Arlen composed the
standard "Stormy Weather" for her to sing. Yet Ethel Waters languishes in the shadows
of others whose careers were enabled by her trailblazing achievements.
Singer-actress ValLimar Jansen and husband Frank Jansen hope to raise awareness of
Waters' significance with "Sweet Mama Stringbean." Taking its title from Waters'
youthful vaudeville nickname, the play features ValLimar's renditions of several
standards associated with Waters, including her signature anthem "His Eye Is on the
Sparrow," "Stormy Weather," "Am I Blue" and "My Handy Man Ain't Handy No More." It's
currently in a limited run at the Fremont Centre Theatre, where the lobby hosts a
display promoting a campaign to fund a star for Waters on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
"Everybody, when I was growing up, thought that 'Julia' with Diahann Carroll was
the first show starring an African-American woman, but it really wasn't," says ValLimar.
"I'm really hoping that people will begin to realize and recognize that Ethel's kind
of been forgotten."
Waters was born in 1896 or 1900, depending on which of her autobiographies you believe,
after her teenaged mother was raped. Violence was more prevalent than warmth or love
throughout her poverty-stricken childhood. By her late teens she was singing and
dancing on the black vaudeville and carnival circuits. By the 1920s, she was a star,
recording for Columbia and Paramount, and performing at venues like the Cotton Club.
In 1933 she starred on Broadway in "As Thousands Cheer" -- the first African-American
woman to do so. She also had her own radio show, another first, and earned an Academy
Award nomination for 1949's "Pinky."
She opened another door when she starred in the 1950 TV series "Beulah" (although
she wound up departing the show in protest over scripts) and continued to sing in
nightclubs. Widely acclaimed for her role in the classic 1952 film "The Member of
the Wedding," she later ran afoul of pop culture arbiters when she toured with evangelist
Billy Graham. She died in 1977.
"Sweet Mama Stringbean" evolved out of a monologue ValLimar wrote for a class after
reading Waters' 1951 autobiography "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," basing the scene
on a "reconciliation moment" between Waters and her mother. The play focuses on Waters'
early career, before 1939.
"Ethel really is the bridge that goes from the shout-and-hollering blues to the more
urban, smooth-sounding blues [and] vocalists that use their voice like a saxophone,
like a horn," ValLimar says. "It was really Ethel that did that, and then Ella [Fitzgerald]
just took it on [laughs]. There were many discussions about how Ethel really was
the originator of that sound, and how she influenced the real blues-jazz women that
didn't sing pop. Ethel teeter-tottered on this real fine tightrope... blues got her
on the radio but pop kept her on the radio. Think about Beyonce and Mariah Carey
and Rihanna; pop has come a long way. [Laughs] In Ethel's day, 'Am I Blue,' 'Dinah'
and 'Stormy Weather' were considered pop."
Onstage, she avoids imitating Waters' voice (which was, typical of many pre-World
War II blues singers, "very nasal, very in the front of the mask"). Instead, she
strives to capture Waters' style.
"I come as close as I possibly can to approximating how she interpreted the music
in terms of phrasing and somewhat in sound, in terms of how she would scat," she
explains. "Ethel began scatting long before Ella was born [laughs]. She was really
patterning her voice after a clarinet, in the same way that later on Billie Holiday
patterned her voice off of a saxophone....
"This is going to sound strange," she says, "but when I listen to Mariah Carey I
can hear Ethel's influence, even though Mariah Carey might not have ever heard anything
that Ethel did, because Ethel influenced other singers who influenced the singers
today. I would put her as the bridge between Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey -- the women
who are the beginning of the blues -- Ethel is the bridge that brings the blues into
popular music."
Jansen insists "Sweet Mama Stringbean" depends on husband Frank's music direction.
"All the arrangements have been written very, very carefully to be true to the style,"
she says. "If you come to the show just to hear the music, you'll be able to feel
and to travel and to see this arc of progression from 1901 to 1939, to feel the music
progress and to hear it. I'm very proud of Frank for doing that."


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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