|
Ethel
Waters was born some time around 1900, after her mother
had been raped at knife-point. Initially billed as "Sweet
Mama String Bean" at the very beginning of her career, Waters
started out in all-black Broadway musical revues, such as Africanna, Lew
Leslie's Blackbirds, and Rhapsody in Black, where she
earned $2500 a week -- a record at the time -- but she refused to
play certain black stereotypes. In 1933, she introduced Harold
Arlen's "Stormy Weather" at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and
Irving Berlin caught her performance and then signed her on for his next
musical revue: a newspaper with its headlines set to music.
Hassard Short's As Thousands Cheer, with songs by Berlin
and sketches by Moss Hart, gave Waters a chance to show off how
versatile she was, alongside such talent as Marilyn Miller and Clifton
Webb. Dressed as an exotic Caribbean dancer, Waters introduced the
world to Berlin's "Heat Wave," but she also went to the
entirely opposite extreme, portraying a Southern woman who has just
discovered that her husband has been lynched, and in the song
"Supper Time" she toils with what to tell her children.
"If one song can tell the whole, tragic history of a race, 'Supper
Time' was that song," she later said. "In singing it, I
was telling my comfortable, well-dressed, well-fed listeners about my
people." From there, we got her in Vincent Minnelli's At
Home Abroad, singing songs by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz with
Beatrice Lillie and Eddie Foy, Jr. Then there was Vernon Duke and
John LaTouche's Cabin in the Sky, and more revues such as Laugh
Time and Blue Holiday. But she was no stranger to
non-musical dramas, either, her first appearance in such a vehicle being
with José Ferrer in DuBose and Dorothy Hayward's Mamba's Daughters,
which boasted songs by Jerome Kern. But, arguably, her most
memorable performance was opposite Julie Harris in Harold Clurman's
production of The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers.
|
