Ethel Waters 1895-1977

Singer, actress

Rejected by Mother, Abused by Aunts

Pushed Into “White Time”

Stunned World With Acting Prowess

Selected discography

Selected writings

Sources

Singer and actress Ethel Waters had an extremely difficult childhood. In fact, she opened her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow with these words: “I was never a child. I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.… Nobody brought me up.” She was conceived in violence and raised in violence. She had a minimal education at best, dropping out of school early to go to work as a maid. But despite her inauspicious beginnings, Ethel Waters made history, garnering many laurels and many “firsts.” She was the first black woman to appear on radio (on April 21, 1922); the first black woman to star on her own at the Palace Theater in New York (in 1925); the first black woman to star in a commercial network radio show (in 1933); the first singer to introduce 50 songs that became hits (in 1933); the first black singer to appear on television (in 1939); and the first black woman to star on Broadway in a dramatic play (also in 1939). She is remembered as much for her fine acting as for her expressive singing—and even more for her spirit.

When Waters’s mother, Louise Anderson, a quiet, religious girl, was in her early teens, a local boy named John Waters raped her at knifepoint. Shortly after Ethel was born, Anderson married Norman Howard, a railroad worker. Waters went by the name Howard for a few years and used several other names, depending on whom she was living with, but finally settled on her father’s name.

Rejected by Mother, Abused by Aunts

Because of the manner in which Waters was conceived, her mother found it hard to accept the child, so the little girl was sent went to live with her grandmother, Sally Anderson (the woman whom Waters would really think of as her mother), and her two aunts, Vi and Ching. Sally Anderson, a domestic worker, moved frequently to find employment and was rarely at home; Waters’s aunts usually ignored her, but what attention they paid her was most often physically abusive. Waters was exceptionally bright and enjoyed near-perfect recall; when she was able to attend school, she enjoyed learning. Mostly, though, she grew up on the streets of South Philadelphia’s “Bloody Eighth Ward.”

Waters started cleaning houses professionally when she was about eight. As a teenager, she dropped out of school

At a Glance…

Born October 31, 1895, in Chester, PA; died of cancer, September 1, 1977, in Chatsworth, CA; daughter of John Weley Waters and Louise Tar Anderson; marritt Merlin “Buddy” Pemsley, c. 1910; married Clyde Edward Matthews, c. 1928; children: goddaughter Algretta Holmes (adopted).

Began work as a maid, c. 1903; worked as substitute maid, dishwasher, and waitress in local hotels and apartment houses; c. 1908-17; sang and toured vaudeville circuit, 1917-mid-1930s; began recording for Cardinal and Black Swan labels, 1921. Appeared in theatrical productions, including Hello 1919!, 1919; Black Bottom, 1926; MiM Calico, 1926-27; Paw Bound, 1927; Ethel Waters Broadway Revue, 1928; Rhapsody in Black, 1930; From Broadway Bacik to Harlem, 1932; Stormy Weather, 1933; As Thousands Cheer, 1934; Mamba’s Daughter, 1939; Cabin in the sky, 1940; Member of the Wedding, 1950; and The Voice of Strangers, 1956. Appeared in films, including On With the Show, 1929; Rufus jones for President, 1933; Bubbling Over, 1934; Cairo, 1942; Tales of Manhattan, 1942; Stage Door Canteen, 1943; Cabin in the Sky, 1943; Pinky, 1949; Member of the Wedding, 1953; Trie Heart is a Rebel, 1956; The Sound and the Fury, 1959; and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, 1963. Appeared on television programs, including series Beulah, ABC-TV, 1950-51.

Awards: Negro Actors Guild Award, 1949, for film Pinky, Academy Award nominations, 1949, for Pinky, and 1953, for Member of the Wedding; New York Drama Critics Award for best actress, 1950, for Member of the Wedding; Tamiment Institute Award, 1951, for His Eye is on the Sparrow; St. Genesius Medal from American National Theater and Academy, 1951; U.S. Postal Service commemorative stamp, 1994.

to work as a substitute maid, dishwasher, and waitress in local hotels and apartment houses. One night in 1917, she sang at a party at a local bar, Jack’s Rathskeller. Two vaudeville producers heard her and convinced her to sign on with them. With little regret, she left her job and began her career.

Waters had a sweet voice, but even more attractive was her ability to imbue a song with emotion—when she sang the blues, the audience felt her pain; when she sang humorous songs, they forgot their cares for the moment. She was unusual on the vaudeville circuit because she did not sing the traditional blues in the time-honored style, popularized by the great Bessie Smith; she sang instead in a light, clear voice, not in the customary deep, rough, southern blues way. Waters quickly became a showstopper. Within two years, she was appearing on Broadway and touring in musical revues. In 1921, she began a fruitful recording career, eventually waxing over 250 songs. She is still recognized as a crucial link between blues, pop, and jazz.

The 1920s and ’30s kept Waters working hard. She arrived in New York City in 1919 and performed in Harlem nightclubs like her favorite, Edmond Johnson’s Cellar. She appeared in musical shows, including Hello 1919!, which was her first, and frequently toured with both musicals and vaudeville acts. Until the mid-1920s, she performed exclusively in black shows and clubs for black audiences and had little desire to move to the more lucrative white-audience theater circuit.

Pushed Into “White Time”

Around 1923, her friend and colleague Earl Dancer convinced her to audition for a white Chicago theater, where she ultimately became a great success at a higher salary than she had ever earned. “Dozens of people in show business say they discovered me. This always irritates me,” she wrote in His Eye Is on the Sparrow. “[Club owner] Edmond’s piano player, Lou Henly, was the first one to get me to sing different types of songs. Earl Dancer pushed me into the white time.” Whatever her route, Waters had arrived; she was the first black singer to break into the “white time.”

Life was better, but far from easy. When Waters performed in the South, she faced deeply entrenched racist attitudes. Once, after she had been seriously hurt in a car accident, she lay neglected in the hospital and almost lost her leg. Another time, she was forced to flee a town minutes before she would have been lynched. Even in some northern locales, blacks did not fare much better. In her autobiography, Waters casually described her working conditions at Chicago’s Monogram Theater. “That was the theater,” she wrote, “where you had to dress way downstairs with the stoker [heater] and come up to the stage climbing slave-ship stairs. While working there I took sick from the migraine headaches I’d had off and on for years. The air was very bad down there where the stoker was.” In spite of the racism in the United States at the time, Waters appealed to audiences of all colors. By 1925, her hit “Dinah” had become an international sensation.

During the late 1920s and the 1930s, film became an important part of Waters’s career; in her first motion picture, 1929’s On With the Show, she sang “Am I Blue,” a tune that would later become a hit for her. She also made a few short feature films for Vitaphone studios in New York, including Rufus Jones for President (1933) and Bubbling Over (1934), all the while continuing to perform in stage and club shows throughout the country and to make records.

Stunned World With Acting Prowess

In 1939 Waters stunned the world when she debuted as a dramatic actress playing Hagar in DuBose Heyward’s southern black classic Mamba’s Daughters. She longed to play the role after having read the book—before the play had even been written. “Hagar had held me spellbound,” she wrote in His Eye Is on the Sparrow. “In Hagar was all my mother’s shock, bewilderment, and insane rage at being hurt…. But Hagar, fighting on in a world that had wounded her so deeply, was more than my mother to me. She was all Negro women lost and lonely in the White man’s antagonistic world.” Ethel held audiences spellbound with her portrayal of Hagar; at the end of her first performance, she received 17 curtain calls. As had been so with her singing, she was able to touch those in the house with the very essence of her character.

While she was one of the highest-paid performers in New York in the 1930s, by the 1940s, Waters had trouble finding work. In 1942 she moved to Los Angeles to appear in the film Cairo and stayed on to film Cabin in the Sky in 1943. After that, the roles dried up; substantial dramatic parts for black women in films and on stage were almost nonexistent. And when she returned to New York, she found that the nightclub scene was changing. Now middle-aged and overweight, Waters had trouble finding work as a singer. She hit professional bottom in 1948, working only a few weeks that year.

Then, in 1949, Waters’s luck changed. She played Granny in the film Pinky and received an Academy Award nomination for her work. A year later, she opened to great critical acclaim in the play Member of the Wedding. In 1953, she received another Academy Award nomination, for her work in the film version of Member. Although she continued to sing, her acting career received considerably more notice.

Despite her success, by the end of the 1950s, Waters began to question the meaningfulness of her career. She had always been a religious woman, but after seeing the Billy Graham Crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York, she rededicated herself and her talents to the glory of God. She joined the Graham Crusade and toured extensively with it. She continued some secular work all of her life, appearing in The Sound and the Fury and The Heart Is a Rebel in the late ’50s and doing occasional guest spots at clubs and on television, but her main focus was the Crusade. She sang with Graham until cancer overtook her in 1977.

Ethel Waters was a great singer because she was a brilliant actress. She once said, “A song is a story—that’s how it is to me—and I sing it so it tells the story.” Waters sold everything she sang to the audience, making them feel each emotion as if it were their own. After establishing her singing career, she brought her formidable abilities to the legitimate theater to the highest critical acclaim. In her best work, she played characters like herself, who fought hard against a cruel world. In the last decades of her life, she used the same talents to express her religious devotion. No matter where she performed, no matter what or whether she sang, she touched people with the pain, humor, and above all, the dignity of her spirit.

Selected discography

Ethel Waters on Stage and Screen (1925-40), CBS, 1989.

Cabin in the Sky, Milan Records, 1992.

Ethel Waters 1925-1926, Classic Records, 1992.

Ethel Waters 1926-1929, Classic Records, 1993.

Who Said Blackbirds Are Blue?, Sandy Hook.

Selected writings

(With Charles Samuels) His Eye Is on the Sparrow, Greenwood Press, 1951.

To Me It’s Wonderful, Harper & Row, 1972.

Sources

Books

DeKorte, Juliann, Ethel Waters: Finally Home, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1978.

Knaack, Twila, Ethel Waters: I Touched a Sparrow, Word Books, 1978.

Morehead, Philip D., and Anne MacNeil, The New American Dictionary of Music, Dutton, 1991.

Notable Black American Women, Gale, 1992.

The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, edited by Donald Clarke, Viking/Penguin Inc., 1989.

Pleasants, Henry, The Great American Popular Singers, Fireside, 1985.

Slonimsky, Nicolas, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Schirmer, 1992.

Southern, Eileen, Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians, Greenwood Press, 1982.

Waters, Ethel, and Charles Samuels, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, new edition, Greenwood Press, 1978.

Waters, Ethel, To Me It’s Wonderful, Harper & Row, 1972.

Periodicals

American Heritage, February/March 1994, pp. 60-73.

American Studies, Fall 1990.

Billboard, April 16, 1988.

Jazz Journal International, December 1988.

Reader’s Digest, December 1972.

Variety, January 27, 1988; April 13, 1988.

—Robin Armstrong

Ethel Waters

Singer, actress

Rejected by Mother, Abused by Aunts

Pushed Into “White Time”

Stunned World With Acting Prowess

Selected discography

Sources

Singer and actress Ethel Waters had an extremely difficult childhood. In fact, she opened her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow with these words: “I was never a child. I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.... Nobody brought me up.” She was conceived in violence and raised in violence. She had a minimal education at best, dropping out of school early to go to work as a maid. But despite her inauspicious beginnings, Ethel Waters made history, garnering many laurels and many “firsts.” She was the first black woman to appear on radio (on April 21, 1922); the first black woman to star on her own at the Palace Theater in New York (in 1925); the first black woman to star in a commercial network radio show (in 1933); the first singer to introduce 50 songs that became hits (in 1933); the first black singer to appear on television (in 1939); and the first black woman to star on Broadway in a dramatic play (also in 1939). She is remembered as much for her fine acting as for her expressive singing—and even more for her spirit.

When Waters’s mother, Louise Anderson, a quiet, religious girl, was in her early teens, a local boy named John Waters raped her at knifepoint. Shortly after Waters was born, Anderson married Norman Howard, a railroad worker. Waters went by the name Howard for a few years and used several other names, depending on whom she was living with, but finally settled on her father’s name.

Rejected by Mother, Abused by Aunts

Because of the manner in which Waters was conceived, her mother found it hard to accept the child, so the little girl was sent went to live with her grandmother, Sally Anderson, the woman whom Waters would really think of as her mother, and her two aunts, Vi and Ching. Sally Anderson, a domestic worker, moved frequently to find employment and was rarely at home; Waters’s aunts usually ignored her, but what attention they paid her was most often physically abusive. Waters was exceptionally bright and enjoyed near-perfect recall; when she was able to attend school, she enjoyed learning. Mostly, though, she grew up on the street.

Waters started cleaning houses professionally when she was about eight. As a teenager, she dropped out of school to work as a substitute maid, dishwasher, and waitress in local hotels and apartment houses. One night in 1917, she sang at a party at a local bar, Jack’s Rathskeller. Two vaudeville producers heard her and convinced her to sign on with them. With little regret, she left her job and began her career.

For the Record…

Born October 31, 1895, in Chester, PA; died of cancer September 1, 1977, in Chatsworth, CA; daughter of John Weley Waters and Louise Tar Anderson; married Merritt “Buddy” Pernsley c. 1910; married Clyde Edward Matthews c. 1928.

Began work as a maid, c. 1903; worked as substitute maid, dishwasher, and waitress in local hotels and apartment houses; c. 1908-1914; sang and toured vaudeville circuit, 1917-mid-1930s; began recording for Cardinal and Black Swan labels, 1921. Appeared in stage musicals, including Hello 1919!, 1919; Jump Steady, 1922; Plantation Revue, 1925; Black Bottom, 1926; Miss Calico, 1926-27; Paris Bound, 1927; Ethel Waters Broadway Revue, 1928; Rhapsody in Black, 1930, 1933; From Broadway Back to Harlem, 1932; Stormy Weather, 1933; As Thousands Cheer, 1934; and Cabin in the Sky, 1940. Appeared in dramas, including Mamba’s Daughter, 1939; Member of the Wedding, 1950; and The Voice of Strangers, 1956. Appeared in films, including On With the Show, 1929; Rufus Jones for President, 1933; Cairo, 1942; Tales of Manhattan, 1942; Stage Door Canteen, 1943; Cabin in the Sky, 1943; Pinky, 1949; Member of the Wedding, 1953; The Heart Is a Rebel, 1956; The Sound and the Fury, 1959; and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, 1963. Appeared on television programs, including series Beulah, ABC-TV, 1950-51. Author of His Eye Is on the Sparrow, Greenwood Press, 1951, and To Me It’s Wonderful, Harper & Row, 1972.

Awards: Negro Actors Guild Award, 1949, for film Pinky; Academy Award nominations, 1949, for Pinky, and 1953, for Member of the Wedding; New York Drama Critics Award for best actress, 1950, for Member of the Wedding; Tamiment Institute Award, 1951, for His Eye Is on the Sparrow; St. Genesius Medal from American National Theater and Academy, 1951; U.S. Postal Service commemorative stamp, 1994.

Waters had a sweet voice, but even more attractive was her ability to imbue a song with emotion—when she sang the blues, the audience felt her pain; when she sang humorous songs, they forgot their cares for the moment. She was unusual on the vaudeville circuit because she did not sing the traditional blues in the time-honored style, popularized by the great Bessie Smith; she sang instead in a light, clear voice, not in the customary deep, rough, southern blues way. Waters quickly became a sensation. Within two years, she was appearing on Broadway and touring in musical revues. In 1921, she began a fruitful recording career, eventually waxing over 250 songs.

The 1920s and ’30s kept Waters working hard. She arrived in New York City in 1919 and performed in Harlem nightclubs like her favorite, Edmond Johnson’s Cellar. She appeared in musical shows, including Hello 1919!, which was her first, and frequently toured with both musicals and vaudeville acts. Until the mid-1920s, she performed exclusively in black shows and clubs for black audiences and had little desire to move to the more lucrative white-audience theater circuit.

Pushed Into “White Time”

But in 1925 her friend and colleague Earl Dancer convinced her to audition for a white Chicago theater, where she ultimately became a great success at a higher salary than she had ever earned. “Dozens of people in show business say they discovered me. This always irritates me,” she wrote in His Eye Is on the Sparrow. “[Club owner] Edmond’s piano player, Lou Henly, was the first one to get me to sing different types of songs. Earl Dancer pushed me into the white time.” Whatever her route, Waters had arrived; she was the first black singer to break into the “white time.”

Life was better, but far from easy. When Waters performed in the South, she faced deeply entrenched racist attitudes. Once, after she had been seriously hurt in a car accident, she lay neglected in the hospital and almost lost her leg. Another time, she was forced to flee a town minutes before she would have been lynched. Even in some northern locales, blacks did not fare much better. In her autobiography, Waters casually described her working conditions at Chicago’s Monogram Theater. “That was the theater,” she wrote, “where you had to dress way downstairs with the stoker [heater] and come up to the stage climbing slave-ship stairs. While working there I took sick from the migraine headaches I’d had off and on for years. The air was very bad down there where the stoker was.” And yet Waters never grew bitter over the hardships she suffered. Indeed, her autobiography maintains a distinctively matter-of-fact tone; it is both funny and sad, a touching testimony to human survival and dignity.

During the 1930s, film became an important part of Waters’s career; in her first motion picture, 1929’s On With the Show, she sang “Am I Blue,” a tune that would later become a hit for her. She also made a few short feature films for Vitaphone studios in New York, including Rufus Jones for President (1933) and Bubbling Over(1934), all the while continuing to perform in stage and club shows throughout the country and to make records.

Stunned World With Acting Prowess

In 1939 Waters stunned the world when she debuted as a dramatic actress playing Hagar in DuBose Heyward’s Mamba’s Daughter. She longed to play the role after having read the book—before the play had even been written. “Hagar had held me spellbound,” she wrote in His Eye Is on the Sparrow. “In Hagar was all my mother’s shock, bewilderment, and insane rage at being hurt.... But Hagar, fighting on in a world that had wounded her so deeply, was more than my mother to me. She was all Negro women lost and lonely in the White man’s antagonistic world.” Ethel held audiences spellbound with her portrayal of Hagar; at the end of her first performance, she received 17 curtain calls. As had been so with her singing, she was able to touch those in the house with the very essence of her character.

While she was one of the highest-paid performers in New York in the 1930s, inexplicably in the 1940s, Waters had trouble finding work. In 1942 she moved to Los Angeles to appear in the film Cairo and stayed on to film Cabin in the Sky in 1943. After that, the roles dried up; substantial dramatic parts for black women in films and on stage were almost nonexistent. And when she returned to New York, she found that the nightclub scene was changing and even had trouble finding work as a singer. She hit professional bottom in 1948, working only a few weeks that year.

Then, in 1949, Waters’s luck changed. She played Granny in the film Pinky and received an Academy Award nomination for her work. A year later, she opened to great critical acclaim in the play Member of the Wedding. In 1953, she received another Academy Award nomination, for her work in the film version of Member. Although she continued to sing, her acting career received considerably more notice.

Despite her success, by the end of the 1950s, Waters began to question the meaningfulness of her career. She had always been a religious woman, but after seeing the Billy Graham Crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York, she rededicated herself and her talents to the glory of God. She joined the Graham Crusade and toured extensively with it. She continued some secular work all of her life, appearing in The Sound and the Fury and The Heart Is a Rebel in the late ’50s and doing occasional guest spots at clubs and on television, but her main focus was the Crusade. She sang with Graham until cancer overtook her in 1977.

Ethel Waters was a great singer because she was a brilliant actress; she sold everything she sang to the audience, making them feel each emotion as if it were their own. After establishing her singing career, she brought her formidable abilities to the legitimate theater to the highest critical acclaim. In her best work, she played characters like herself, who fought hard against a cruel world. In the last decades of her life, she used the same talents to express her religious devotion. No matter where she performed, no matter what or whether she sang, she touched people with the pain, humor, and above all, the dignity of her spirit.

Selected discography

Ethel Waters on Stage and Screen (1925-40), CBS, 1989.

Cabin in the Sky, Milan Records, 1992.

Ethel Waters 1925-1926, Classic Records, 1992.

Ethel Waters 1926-1929, Classic Records, 1993.

Who Said Blackbirds Are Blue?, Sandy Hook.

Sources

Books

DeKorte, Juliann, Ethel Waters: Finally Home, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1978.

Knaack, Twila, Ethel Waters: I Touched a Sparrow, Word Books, 1978.

Morehead, Philip D., and Anne MacNeil, The New American Dictionary of Music, Dutton, 1991.

Notable Black American Women, Gale, 1992.

The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, edited by Donald Clarke, Viking/Penguin Inc., 1989.

Slonimsky, Nicolas, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Schirmer, 1992.

Southern, Eileen, Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians, Greenwood Press, 1982.

Waters, Ethel, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, Greenwood Press, 1951, reprinted, 1978.

Waters, Ethel, To Me It’s Wonderful, Harper & Row, 1972.

Periodicals

American Studies, Fall 1990.

Billboard, April 16, 1988.

Jazz Journal International, December 1988.

Reader’s Digest, December 1972.

Variety, January 27, 1988; April 13, 1988.

—Robin Armstrong

Ethel Waters

Born October 31, 1896

Chester, Pennsylvania

Died September 1, 1977

Chatsworth, California

American singer, actress, and writer

"I had fame, but I was empty."

Among the dynamic entertainers that people flocked to Harlem by the carload to see was Ethel Waters, a talented singer and actress who had emerged from humble beginnings to become a star of nightclubs, musical revues, Broadway shows, and, eventually, films. Waters began her career by singing the blues—the new, uniquely African American musical form that was taking the United States by storm—but her smooth, sophisticated style took her beyond that category and into the broader realm of popular music. Waters's very emotional singing style—and, later, the realism she put into her dramatic roles—made her an especially memorable performer. She was also an African American trailblazer, becoming the first black woman to perform on radio (in 1922) and the first black singer to appear on television (in 1939).

"I was never a child...."

Waters had a difficult, impoverished childhood. Her mother, Louise Anderson, was only thirteen when she gave birth to her daughter, who was the product of a rape by a local young white man named John Waters. (Ethel eventually took her father's surname.) Anderson found it too difficult to accept this child born of such violence, so Ethel was raised primarily by her grandmother, Sally Anderson, who lived at various times in Chester and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in Camden, New Jersey. Waters's grandmother was a domestic worker who was rarely at home, and the two aunts who also lived with Waters usually ignored her and sometimes abused her. In her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow, Waters reflected, "I was never a child. I never was coddled or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.... Nobody brought me up."

Young Waters spent a lot of time roaming the streets, sometimes even stealing food when she was hungry. She liked school but didn't attend it regularly. At the age of five she sang in a children's program at a Philadelphia church, and this first appearance as an entertainer was a huge success. When Waters was eight years old she went to work for the first time, cleaning houses. Five years later her family pressured her into marrying a man named Merritt Buddy Pernsley, but she left him a year later.

Waters spent her teenage years working as a maid, a dishwasher, and a waitress. In 1917, she sang at a party at a neighborhood bar, Jack's Rathskeller. Two vaudeville (a kind of variety show—often touring—that featured musical, dance, and comedy acts) producers who were in the audience were impressed with her talent and hired her to perform in Baltimore. During that two-week engagement, Waters became the first female singer to perform the great blues song "St. Louis Blues" on stage. Soon thereafter, she signed on with a group called the Hill Sisters and toured the southern states as Sweet Mama Stringbean (a nickname that referred to her slenderness).

A sophisticated style emerges

For a few years Waters took a number of jobs as a singer and dancer in carnivals and on the black vaudeville circuit. Her unusual singing style made her stand out from other blues singers: instead of the kind of deep, rough singing practiced by stars like Ma Rainey (1886–1939) and Bessie Smith (1894–1937; see biographical entry), Waters sang in a light, clear, and polished voice, injecting a great deal of emotion into the music.

While on tour in Alabama, Waters received a severe leg injury in a car accident and returned to Philadelphia to recuperate. After some time she got a job singing in Barney Gordon's Saloon in Philadelphia and her performances there were so popular that she was hired in 1919 to perform at the famous Lincoln Theatre in Harlem. When that engagement was finished, Waters went on to sing at Edmond's Cellar, a seedy Harlem club that was frequented by a lot of gamblers, prostitutes, and other disreputable types. In time, however, Waters's sophisticated singing attracted a higher-quality crowd, and her reputation as a fine singer and dancer—bolstered by her appearance in a black musical comedy called Hello 1919!—continued to spread.

Recordings broaden her audience

Waters made the first of many recordings in 1919, when the Cardinal Company hired her to record "New York Glide" and "At the New Jump Steady Ball." Three years later Black Swan Records paid her one hundred dollars to record "Down Home Blues" and "Oh Daddy." (At the time this was a large sum to be paid for two songs.) These songs were so successful that Waters quickly cut another record with "There'll Be Some Changes Made" on one side and "One Man Nan" on the other. Over the next two years Waters made twenty-six records for Black Swan, and she went on tour with Fletcher Henderson's Black Swan Troubadours to promote her music.

Waters spent much of her time in the early 1920s traveling throughout the Midwest, the East, and the South on the Theatre Owners and Bookers Association (TOBA) circuit, gaining more and more fans both black and white. In 1924 she starred in the Plantation Revue in Chicago, and Ashton Stevens, a reviewer for that city's Herald Examiner newspaper, called her "the greatest artist of her race and generation." The next year Waters headlined at the Plantation Club in New York, where she made a hit of a song called "Dinah." She was offered a spot in the Revue Negre in Paris but turned it down, which gave dancer Josephine Baker (1906–1975; see sidebar on p. 82) her big break.

Next, Waters was persuaded by producer and performer Earl Dancer to try out for the white vaudeville circuit. She and Dancer formed a team and became a very successful headlining act. Waters made her first Broadway appearance in 1927 in Africana, which had a long run in New York and then went on tour. After the show closed Waters returned to New York and appeared as a single act in various nightclubs and shows. She married Clyde Matthews during this period and continued to make recordings (259 in her overall career) for such companies as Paramount, Vocalion, and Columbia.

Film, Broadway, and nightclub star

Waters began her movie career in 1929 with an appearance in On with the Show, in which she sang "Am I Blue?" The next year she was in Check and Double Check with Amos and Andy (a well-known white comedy duo who played black characters) and the famous bandleader and composer Duke Ellington (1899–1974; see biographical entry). Also in 1930 Waters traveled to Europe and performed in Paris and London; while still in England she underwent successful surgery to remove a vocal cord nodule (small bump or growth). Returning to New York, Waters starred in more musical shows, including Blackbirds of 1930 in New York and Rhapsody in Black, which opened in Washington, D.C., but soon went on tour.

During the early 1930s Waters became the highest paid star ever to appear at Harlem's celebrated nightspot, the Cotton Club. This was where she introduced the song that would become her most famous, "Stormy Weather." White Broadway producer Irving Berlin (1888–1989) saw Waters at the Cotton Club and was so impressed that he signed her to appear in a new musical called As Thousands Cheer. This 1934 production was a huge success—and something of a landmark because Waters was the first black performer to appear on Broadway with an otherwise all-white cast. She received equal billing with her white costars, even when the show went on the road in the South, where comparable treatment was unheard of. As Thousands Cheer featured Waters singing such songs as "Heat Wave," "Harlem," and the haunting "Supper Time," sung in the voice of a woman whose husband has been lynched (hanged illegally by a mob).

For two years Waters traveled all around the United States with As Thousands Cheer, during which time she separated from her husband. She also appeared in a Broadway revue called At Home Abroad in 1935 and 1936, then toured the South with trumpet player Eddie Mallory. Another milestone was just around the corner for the entertainer: in 1939 she became the first black woman to play a lead role in a dramatic play on Broadway, appearing as Hagar in DuBose Heyward's Mamba's Daughters. Waters poured into this character all of the suffering, loneliness, and courage of her own mother, and audiences responded with seventeen curtain calls on opening night. The play had a long Broadway run, followed by a tour and a return New York engagement.

To California and back

Next, Waters appeared as Petunia Jackson in the play Cabin in the Sky, which ran for five months in New York in 1940 before heading on the road to Los Angeles and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, Waters was performing at the Orpheum Theatre when she was offered a role in a film called Tales of Manhattan. In 1942 she appeared in another film, Cairo, with white movie star Jeannette McDonald, and she bought a house in Los Angeles. The next year Waters starred in the film version of Cabin in the Sky, but this was her last film role for several years. At that time there were few good motion picture roles for black actors. (Some would argue that this situation remained essentially the same even at the beginning of the twenty-first century.)

Disappointed with her situation in California, Waters returned to New York, but her singing career seemed to have stalled as well. She performed at the Club Zanzibar in 1947 and gave a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1948, but for the most part she was unemployed and struggling to support herself and her mother. Waters wondered what had happened to her fame of only a few years ago. In early 1949, though, her luck changed when she was offered the part of Granny in the film Pinky. Waters used her own grandmother as the model for this role, and she would later claim that all of her acting was instinctive (rather than something she had learned) and based either on her own experiences or those of people she knew. She received an Academy Award nomination for this film appearance.

The Member of the Wedding

But Waters's most acclaimed stage and film role was still to come. In early 1950 she was offered the part of Berenice Sadie Brown, a cook who serves as a compassionate friend to the little girl who is the central character in Carson McCuller's play The Member of the Wedding (based on her 1946 novel). The play ran for 501 performances on Broadway, during which time Waters wrote (with author Charles Samuels) her autobiography,His Eye Is on the Sparrow. In 1953 Waters appeared in the film version of The Member of the Wedding and again received an Academy Award nomination for her work.

Around the same time Waters starred in a weekly television series called Beulah and also appeared in a one-woman show, An Evening with Ethel Waters. By the late 1950s she had achieved considerable success but still felt that something was missing in her life; as recounted in Ethel Waters: Finally Home by Juliann DeKorte, she later declared, "I had fame, but I was empty." Then Waters went to see the Billy Graham Crusade (a series of large religious meetings featuring Christian leader Billy Graham) at Madison Square Garden in New York. She experienced a kind of religious awakening, and for the rest of her life she devoted much of her time to working as a singer with Graham's organization.

In her remaining years Waters appeared in two more films (The Heart Is a Rebel, 1956, and The Sound and the Fury, 1959) and many stage revivals of The Member of the Wedding. She also did occasional guest spots on television and in nightclubs, and she wrote another autobiography, To Me It's Wonderful (1972). But her health steadily declined, and she died of cancer in 1977, remembered as a dynamic, talented performer whose career blossomed far beyond its roots in the Harlem Renaissance.

For More Information

Books

DeKorte, Juliann. Ethel Waters: Finally Home. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1978.

Kellner, Bruce. The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Knaack, Twila. Ethel Waters: I Touched a Sparrow. Word Books, 1978.

Placksin, Sally. American Women in Jazz: 1900 to the Present. New York: Seaview Books, 1982.

Southern, Eileen. Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

Waters, Ethel, and Charles Samuels. His Eye Is on the Sparrow. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1951.

Waters, Ethel. To Me It's Wonderful. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Periodicals

Rankin, Allen. "The Three Lives of Ethel Waters." Reader's Digest (December 1972): 81–85.

Ethel Waters

Vocalist and actress Ethel Waters (1896–1977) was a key figure in the development of African American culture between the two world wars. She broke barrier after barrier, becoming the first black woman heard on the radio, the first black singer to perform on television, the first African American to perform in an integrated cast on Broadway, and the first black woman to perform in a lead dramatic role on Broadway. As a singer Waters introduced over 50 songs that became hits, including standards of the magnitude of "St. Louis Blues" and "Stormy Weather." Her jazzy yet controlled vocal style influenced a generation of vocalists, black and white, and her career, encompassing stage, song, and screen, flowered several times in comebacks after tumbling to low points.

Today Waters is hardly ever mentioned in the same breath with other major African American performers of the1920s and 1930s. While the careers of jazz artists like Louis Armstrong or even her blues–singing contemporary Bessie Smith are exhaustively dissected by historians, Waters is remembered chiefly by listeners and performers with a special interest in the early years of the American popular song industry. Only a few reissues of her recordings have been made available on compact discs and online music services.

There are several reasons for this disparity, all of which can be reduced to the idea that Waters and her career could not easily be mythologized. Her field was pop, not the jazz or blues that has typically fascinated investigators of the American musical past, although she was touched creatively by both those genres. She lived and worked for decades, not dying the tragic death of Billie Holiday, a singer with a background similar to her own. And late in life she turned to gospel music, appearing with prominent conservative figures in an era when African American militancy was on the rise. "You don't become a jazz legend by growing old, playing grandmothers, and palling around with Billy Graham and Richard Nixon," noted singer Susannah McCorkle in an essay on Waters that appeared in American Heritage magazine.

Yet Waters overcame a childhood as bitterly hard as Armstrong's or Holiday's. She was conceived when her mother, 12 years old at the time, was raped at knifepoint. Born in Chester, Pennsylvania and growing up in and around nearby Philadelphia, she was raised by a grandmother and two alcoholic aunts, who abused her physically. She had neither a bed nor a bathtub and had vivid memories of opening closet doors only to come face to face with a rat on numerous occasions. By the time she was seven, Waters was serving as lookout for prostitutes and pimps in what she called Philadelphia's "Bloody Eighth Ward." "I played with the thieves' children and the sporting women's trick babies," Waters recalled in her autobiography, His Eye Is On the Sparrow. "It was they who taught me how to steal."

Some bright spots came in a Catholic school she began attending when she was nine; where nuns noticed her gifts for speaking and mimicry and her powerful memory (Waters called it "elephantine"). Waters married an older man named Merritt Purnsley in 1910. The marriage was abusive and ended after less than a year; she later married and divorced twice more, never had children, and rarely spoke of her marriages. As a teenager, Waters was often hired out by her grandmother as a housecleaner or chambermaid—jobs that seem dismal now, but for Waters seemed to open up a whole new world. She dreamed of being hired by a wealthy woman who would take her on travels around the world, and she would stand in front of mirrors in the houses she cleaned and do song-and-dance routines. Waters had already impressed Philadelphia churchgoers as a singer as far back as age five.

Performed as "Sweet Mama Stringbean"

In 1917 Waters entered a singing contest at a Philadelphia bar, and before long she had joined a touring vaudeville show led by a duo named Braxton and Nugent and was being paid ten dollars a week. Performing at first as part of a trio billed as the Hill Sisters, she soon connected with audiences as a soloist and was dubbed "Sweet Mama Stringbean." During this period she heard "St. Louis Blues," a composition by pioneering blues songwriter W.C. Handy, performed by a female impersonator and got Handy's permission to give the song its formal premiere at Baltimore's Lincoln Theater. Soon "St. Louis Blues" became her trademark, and even when she appeared in Atlanta with the great Bessie Smith, the crowd clamored for her to sing it. Even as she began to find success, Waters lacked confidence; she sometimes returned to manual-labor jobs so that she would have them to fall back on.

Touring the South was a necessity for black vaudeville troupes, for that was where the bulk of their audiences were to be found. But it could also be brutally dangerous. In Atlanta, Waters was almost lynched after a dispute over piano tuning. And after an auto accident in Anniston, Alabama, Waters had to plead for her life with passing white motorists who told her at first that they would rather see her die. She was taken to the segregated black ward of a nearby white-run hospital and basically left to die; oil and dirt that had become trapped in her leg wound were never removed. Gangrene threatened her with the loss of a leg, but she was finally removed from the hospital after the illegal intercession of a white nurse and treated by a nearby black surgeon.

To escape the hazardous life of touring vaudeville, Waters tried her luck in New York. Again uncertain of her skills, she quickly found work in black stage musicals and at Harlem nightclubs like Edmond's Cellar, where audiences demanded the racy double-meaning blues songs of the day. But at the urging of pianist Lou Henley she also applied her talents to more elegant pop songs of the day like Irving Berlin's "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." Her versatility got noticed at Black Swan, the top black-owned record label of the day, and the 26 sides she recorded there included "Down Home Blues" (the label's first big success) and other hits. Waters went back on the road, sometimes working with an orchestra led by future swing arranger and bandleader Fletcher Henderson and providing him with a crucial dose of blues feeling.

In 1924, again reluctant but urged on by Harlem performer Earl Dancer, Waters went to Chicago to try to break into the more lucrative world of white vaudeville. She was an immediate hit and followed up her success there with a run at New York's Plantation Club. Through the 1920s, Waters was a successful jazz vocalist, recording with the likes of Benny Goodman and the brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. Her greatest successes, however, still came on stage. She appeared on Broadway in several high-profile all-black musicals and toured the United States and Europe. Booked at Harlem's Cotton Club in the early 1930s, the focal point of New York's "black and tan" scene that drew white audiences to hear top African-American artists, Waters premiered "Stormy Weather," a new song by future Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen.

Joined Cast of Berlin Musical

Her interpretation of the song was soon the talk of New York, and songwriter Irving Berlin stopped in to hear it. He invited Waters to star in his new topical musical As Thousands Cheer, and in 1934 she became the first black star in an otherwise all-white musical cast. Berlin's show included "Supper Time," an anti-lynching song for Waters that prefigured the success of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" several years later. Waters followed up that success with another well-reviewed appearance in the revue At Home Abroad in 1935.

Wanting to stretch herself as an actress, Waters cut back on her singing in the late 1930s in favor of dramatic stage roles. In 1939 she starred in Mamba's Daughters, a play by Porgy and Bess lyricist DuBose Heyward, becoming the first black actress to star in a Broadway drama. Exhausted by the intensity of playing a character who reminded her of her own grandmother and of her own terrible childhood, Waters nevertheless looked back on the play's run (in an interview quoted by McCorkle) as "fourteen months of glory." She appeared in the musical Cabin in the Sky in 1940 and co-starred with Louis Armstrong and the young Lena Horne (a Waters disciple in many ways) in its film version two years later.

A nondrinker and nonsmoker, Waters dealt with the pressures of live theater by eating. Her weight ballooned to more than 300 pounds, and roles dried up. Nearly losing her California home, Waters was forced to appear wherever she could in minor nightclubs. But things turned around with her appearances as a grandmother in Pinky (1949), an Elia Kazan-directed film that brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

The following year, she agreed to appear in the Carson McCullers play The Member of the Wedding after the role of Berenice Sadie Brown was rewritten to give it a more religious orientation. Waters won a New York Drama Critics' Circle award for her performance, which included a rendition of the gospel hymn "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." The hymn's title became the name of her best-selling 1951 autobiography, which unsentimentally recounted the hellish trials of her early life. In 1952 the film version of The Member of the Wedding brought Waters another Oscar nomination.

Took Criticism for Maid Portrayal

Waters starred as a maid in the television series Beulah in 1950, becoming the first African-American to reach stardom in the new television medium. Civil rights organizations, growing in influence, criticized Waters for upholding the maid stereotypes that had often plagued blacks in Hollywood, but Waters, who had worked for years as a maid herself, maintained that there was no shame in playing one on screen. For much of the 1950s Waters steadily pulled in audiences as the star of her own one-woman show. But, living alone in an apartment in New York City, she felt isolated and unfulfilled.

In 1957, Waters attended a revival held at Madison Square Garden as part of the Billy Graham Crusade. She joined the Graham choir at first, then began to lend her gifts as a gospel soloist to Graham. After Waters announced that she had become a born-again Christian in 1957, her weight dropped from 380 to 160 pounds. Through Graham she met and became friends with Richard Nixon and his family, and she espoused politically conservative positions. "I'm not concerned with civil rights," Waters said in an interview quoted by McCorkle. "I'm only concerned with God-given rights, and they are available to everyone!"

Waters performed at the White House in 1971, returning the following year as a guest at the wedding of presidential daughter Tricia Nixon. She was also honored by Graham at a 1972 testimonial dinner attended by a galaxy of Hollywood stars. Her final appearance came at a Billy Graham Crusade event held in San Diego in August of 1976. She suffered from cataracts, heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure, and cancer, and finally died on September 1, 1977 at the home of future biographer Paul DeKorte. "Because of her trailblazing style, Waters deserves to be as widely listened to and loved as the jazz icons Bessie Smtih and Billie Holiday," McCorkle noted in 1994, and Waters was honored on a U.S. Postal Service commemmorative stamp that year. But a decade later historians were still just beginning to appreciate her accomplishments.

Books

Contemporary Musicians, volume 11, Gale, 1994.

Waters, Ethel, with Charles Samuels, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, Doubleday, 1951.

Periodicals

American Heritage, February-March 1994.

Online

"Ethel Waters," All Movie Guide, http:/www.allmovie.com (January 11, 2005).

"Ethel Waters," Harlem 1900-1940, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/text/ewaters.html (January 11, 2005).

"Ethel Waters," Red Hot Jazz, http://www.redhotjazz.com/waters.html (January 11, 2005).

Waters, Ethel

Waters, Ethel, African American singer and actress; b. Chester, Pa., Oct. 31,1896; d. Chatsworth, Calif., Sept. 1, 1977. In the course of 60 years, Waters pursued successive careers as a blues singer, a jazz singer, a musical comedy star, a dramatic actress, and a gospel singer. As an African American and a female, she was responsible for a number of firsts: she was the first black woman to sing on the radio and to appear on television, and she was the first black woman to star at the Palace Theater in N.Y. (the peak of success in vaudeville), in a network radio series, in an integrated Broadway show, and in a straight play on Broadway. Her career parallels the struggle for racial equality in the U.S. during the first three-quarters of the 20th century and stands as an example of its success. As an actress she was usually cast as a domestic servant, but she earned awards and nominations for her performances. As a singer she scored numerous hits, including “Am I Blue?” and “Stormy Weather.” Her combination of soulful interpretation and precise diction made her a profound influence on later singers both black and white.

Waters was the illegitimate child of 12-year-old Louise Tar Anderson, who was raped by John Wesley Waters. Raised largely by her grandmother, Sarah Harris Anderson, she was singing in church by the age of five. When she was 11, she began to win dance contests at Pop Grey’s Dance Hall in Chester. In 1910, at the age of 13, she married Mer ritt Purnsley and dropped out of school after the sixth grade to work at a series of menial jobs. The couple separated within a year.

On Oct. 31,1917, the day she turned 21, Waters sang at a Halloween Party at Jack’s Rathskeller, a saloon in Philadelphia, where she was seen by the vaudeville team of Braxton and Nugent, who offered her a job with their troupe. Billed as Sweet Mama Stringbean, she made her first professional appearance with them shortly afterward at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore, then went on tour as part of the Hill Sisters into 1918. Returning to Philadelphia, she appeared at Barney Gordon’s saloon, moving on to N.Y. by 1919, where she debuted at another Lincoln Theatre, then performed at Edmond’s Cellar, a nightclub in Harlem. Later in the year, she appeared in the musical Hello, 1919! at Harlem’s Lafayette Theater and on tour. She made her first recordings, ’The New York Glide” and “At the New Jump Steady Ball,” backed by Albury’s Blue and Jazz Seven, for Cardinal Records in 1921. That same year she was signed to Black Swan Records, the first blackowned record company, and scored her first hit, “Down Home Blues,” in September.

Waters toured extensively in the early 1920s, both on her own and with various revues. She gradually crossed over from exclusively black to both white and black audiences. In 1925 she introduced “Dinah” (music by Harry Akst, lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young) at the Plantation Club in N.Y; she recorded it in October and it became a major hit in January 1926, after which she was sufficiently well known to tour in her own revues under such titles as Ethel Waters Floor Show and Ethel Waters Vanities.

Waters made her Broadway debut in the all-black revue Africana (N.Y, July 11, 1927); she sang “I’m Coming, Virginia” (music by Donald Heywood, lyrics by Heywood and Will Marion Cook), which she had already recorded for a hit. The show ran 77 performances. Before it went on tour, Waters starred at the Palace for the first time.

Waters toured with Africana and with her own revue in 1928. Around this time she married her second husband, Clyde Edward Matthews; this marriage lasted until about 1933.

Waters made her film debut in On with the Show in May 1929. The two songs she sang, “Am I Blue?” and “Birmingham Bertha” (both music by Harry Akst, lyrics by Grant Clarke), appeared on either side of a Columbia Records single that became a best-seller in October. She spent most of the year in Europe.

Waters returned to Broadway in another all-black revue, Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds (N.Y, Oct. 22,1930), which ran 61 performances. The same month she was seen as part of Duke Ellington’s orchestra in the film Check and Double Check, and she recorded “Three Little Words” (music by Harry Ruby, lyrics by Bert Kalmar) from the score for a hit in January 1931. Producer Lew Leslie had yet another all-black revue ready by the spring, and Waters appeared in Rhapsody in Black (May 4, 1931), which ran 80 performances and from which she recorded “You Can’t Stop Me from Loving You” (music by Alberta Nichols, lyrics by Mann Holiner) for a hit in July. She toured with Rhapsody in Black and with other revues into 1933.

Waters’s fame was increased by her appearance in the revue Cotton Club Parade (N.Y, April 6, 1933) at the Cotton Club in Harlem with Duke Ellington. The performances were frequently broadcast on radio, and Waters introduced “Stormy Weather” (music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ted Koehler), which she recorded for the biggest hit of her career. The effect of this success was to permanently expand her appeal beyond exclusively black productions: before the year was out she had recorded with Benny Goodman’s orchestra, become the host of her own network radio show, American Revue, and returned to Broadway in an integrated revue, Irving Berlin’s As Thousands Cheer (N.Y, Sept. 30, 1933), which had a run of 390 performances and in which she sang “Supper Time,” a song about the lynching of Southern blacks, and “Heat Wave,” which she recorded for a hit in October.

Waters returned to N.Y. after the national tour for As Thousands Cheer in 1935 and went into another revue, At Home Abroad (N.Y, Sept. 19,1935), which had songs by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz and ran 198 performances. Around this time she was with her third (apparently common-law) husband, trumpeter and bandleader Eddie Mallory, whose band backed her during her extensive tours in the second half of the 1930s.

Waters starred in Dorothy and Du Böse Heyard’s drama Mamba’s Daughters (N.Y, Jan. 3,1939), which ran 162 performances and marked her transition from singing to serious acting, though she did sing one song in the play, Jerome Kern and Du Böse Heyward’s “Lonesome Walls.”

Waters next starred in the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky (N.Y, Oct. 25, 1940), with a score by Vernon Duke and John Latouche; it ran 156 performances. After the U.S. entry into World War II, she toured military bases for the USO, but she also found time for several film roles, appearing in Tales of Manhattan and Cairo in 1942 and in Cabin in the Sky and Stage Door Canteen in 1943. She returned to Broadway in the revues Laugh Time (N.Y, Sept. 8,1943), which ran 126 performances in N.Y after a national tour that began in Los Angeles, and Blue Holiday (N.Y, May 21, 1945), which was a flop.

After the war Waters returned to touring in nightclubs and theaters throughout the country. Her next film role, in Pinky (1949), earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Her performance in the straight play The Member of the Wedding (N.Y, Jan. 5, 1950) ran 501 performances and brought her the N.Y Drama Critics Award for Best Actress; when she repeated her role in the 1952 film version she got another Oscar nomination. Beginning Oct. 3, 1950, she starred in the television comedy series Beulah, continuing through April 1952. She published her first autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, in 1951; it became a best- seller.

Starting in 1953, Waters performed in her own stage production, At Home with Ethel Waters (later An Evening with Ethel Waters), touring North America into the 1960s. She also acted in many regional revivals of The Member of the Wedding. She made a few more film appearances, in Carib Gold (1955), The Heart Is a Rebel (1956), and TheSound and the Fury (1959), and appeared as a guest star on several television series, including an episode of Route 66 in 1961 that brought her an Emmy nomination. But her primary activity during the last two decades of her life was performing as part of the religious crusades of evangelist Billy Graham. She published her second autobiography, To Me It’s Wonderful, in 1972. She died at age 80 of kidney failure and cancer.

Writings

With Charles Samuels, His Eye Is on the Sparrow (Garden City, N.Y., 1951); To Me It’s Wonderful (N.Y., 1972).

Bibliography

J. DeKorte, E. W.: Finally Home (Old Tappan, N.J., 1978); T. Knaack, E. W.: I Touched a Sparrow (Waco, Tex., 1978).

—William Ruhlmann