[Dixielandjazz] Ethel Waters biography reviewed

[Harry Callaghan]

And let us not forget Ethel's 1921 recording of "Oh Daddy"

 For anyone who has not heard it, it can be found at YouTube.com

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 12:50 PM, Robert Ringwald <rsr at ringwald.com> wrote:

> Ethel Waters: Her Eye Was on the Sparrow and on the Prize
> by Carrie Rickey
> Philadelphia Inquirer blog, March 11, 2011
> Only 300 pages into "Heat Wave," Donald Bogle's engrossing (500-page)
> portrait of
> Ethel Waters (1896-1977), the Chester-born star of stage ("As Thousands
> Cheer," "Mamba's
> Daughters," "The Member of the Wedding") and screen ("Cabin in the Sky,"
> "Pinky")
> and disc ("Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe," "Am I Blue?"), and I have
> to say,
> whether your interest is show business or Philadelphia history, read this
> book about
> the entertainer Lena Horne called "the mother of us all."
> It was Waters who first recorded "Stormy Weather," Horne's signature song.
> It was
> Waters who was the first African-American to have her own TV show, "Beulah"
> (1950).
> (For many black viewers this was a dubious milestone as she played a
> subservient
> maid who cheerfully solves the problems of a white family.
> I was taken by the descriptions of Waters' nomadic life in Camden, Chester
> and Philadelphia.
> For about 15 months, Bogle writes, she and her family lived in a back alley
> on South
> Philadelphia's Clifton Street, then in a red-light district where the young
> Ethel
> earned pennies by running errands for prostitutes and pimps. Bogle writes
> that she
> briefly attended an unspecified Friends School in Philadelphia and a
> multiracial
> Catholic school.
> In vaudeville she memorably sang -- and danced -- "Shake That Thing" and
> also shared
> the bill with Bessie Smith. Josephine Baker was her understudy during the
> early 1920s
> at New York's Plantation Club. Miss Ethel Waters, as she called herself,
> liked to
> say, even when she watched divas of a later age, that she "could still show
> those
> b-----s."
> I am immoderately fond of Waters. My favorite moment of her on film is
> singing "Taking
> a Chance on Love" in "Cabin in the Sky," starry-eyed when Eddie "Rochester"
> Anderson
> gives her a wringer washer. You?
>
> http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/flickgrrl/Ethel-Waters-Her-eye-was-on-the-sparrow-and-on-the-prize.html
>
>
> --Bob Ringwald
> www.ringwald.com
> Fulton Street Jazz Band
> 530/ 642-9551 Office
> 916/ 806-9551 Cell
> Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV
>
> An Irish Man is sitting in the pub with his wife and he says, "I love you."
> She asks, "Is that you or the beer talking?"
> He replies, "It's me talking to the beer."
>
>
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