[Dixielandjazz] Ethel Waters

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Even younger than I am now, I was on a school exchange in 1967,  when I remember the posters plastered around Lexington, Ky., with the name ETHEL WATERS.  She was coming to town as part of the sort of package equally likely to bear the name DR. BILLY GRAHAM,  strictly evangelical.  I'm afraid I wasn't able to go along and hear the lady, who so far as I was aware had dedicated herself to work of that sort by then.  

This would be after the episode of the series ROUTE   66 which somehow turned up on British TV quite a long time ago, and a long time after it was recorded, the one which Willie the Lion Smith was so scathing about in his memoirs, on the ground that the band of veterans brought together to serenade the forgotten star --  Ms. Waters as a road accident victim -- was reorganised visually so that Jo Jones was actually miming to the trumpet part, or maybe mugging-miming. Did he look more like a trumpeter than Roy Eldridge?  Roy of course was a drummer, felt like a drummer (no good sounding like one if you don't feel like one) and looked great -- it was a nice surprise seeing that suddenly and unexpectedly when "You tube!" was only a Billy Connolly term of abuse, glossed as "o you of little inner substance!"

Robert R. Calder