by Donald Bogle
At the club, she quickly assessed the other performers, sizing up any competition while at the same time remaining on the lookout for any sparkle that would enhance the entire show. Never one to prefer a performer who was a pushover, she enjoyed challenging herself to be better than everyone else she worked with. But she liked top-notch competition. “I’ll show them bitches250 , 40,” was a comment she eventually made when she had to deal with female rivals, perhaps some male rivals too, who she believed might have the audacity to try to compete with her. At Edmond’s, she felt she was in good company. There was an energetic dancer like Ramsey, another singer, and an oddball female entertainer—an eccentric dancer—named Edna Winston, who was known “for showing her laundry41.” Apparently, the customers liked what they saw because they quickly dropped money into the kitty.
Mainly, though, Ethel gravitated to the musicians. If a musician knew his stuff, he earned her respect whether that musician was the piano player, the trumpeter, the saxophonist, the trombonist, the drummer, or the orchestra leader. By now, she could quickly spot and appreciate a musician’s capabilities, his skill at innovation, his ability to give her what she needed to make a song work. She wanted the best musicians to back her up, and she never took a drummer or saxophone or piano player for granted. Here she enjoyed working with a three-piece band, which included pianist Johnny Lee and drummer Georgie Barber.
Onstage at Edmond’s, Waters learned all the more that New York audiences had seen the best and expected nothing less. Her clear and crisp diction became more so now. Unlike rural Southern audiences in those towns and communities where she had appeared earlier, New Yorkers and patrons in other metropolitan areas—especially once whites started hitting the Black clubs and buying the records of Black singers—weren’t as easily satisfied with the gut-bucket grunts and groans, the earthy sounds of a Ma Rainey or sometimes even a Bessie Smith. Instead they wanted to understand each and every line of a lyric. Some music critics might later say that Waters, with her diction, partly appropriated the style of white stars. But in truth, she had grown up in Philadelphia without a Southern accent or dialect. Her diction came naturally to her.
On the tiny stage at Edmond’s, she was developing a style, both cool and hot, for which she would become famous. Standing onstage, she still had a rush of energy and could kick up her heels, if she felt the song required that. But because she still had not completed her recovery from the leg injury in Birmingham, sometimes she didn’t move much, instead performing a slowed-down version of her bumps and grinds. That made her performances all the sexier. It also set her apart from most of the female entertainers of the era. Her slow-burn style wasn’t there yet, but it was on its way.
Some of her songs were risqué, others just fun, the titles themselves revealing their sexy perspective, songs like “I Want to Be Somebody’s Baby Doll So I Can Get My Loving All the Time” and “Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble.” She also performed “Chinese Blues,” for which she wrote the lyrics, and, of course, “St. Louis Blues.” Yet Ethel didn’t always feel comfortable with some of her naughty songs, which were “ungodly raw”—nor with her belly shakes. “I was just a42 young girl and when I tried to sing anything but the double-meaning songs, they’d say, ‘Oh my God, Ethel, get hot,’ ” she once said. Having to please the nightclub crowd that “didn’t come up to Harlem to go to church,” she added, “I never was like43 that inside. I wanted to sing decent things, but they wouldn’t let me. They didn’t even know I could—I, who at home, to get things off my chest, would rip loose with a good, rousing spiritual.” Waters also began—at the urging of the piano player Lou Henley—to expand her repertoire and experiment with ballads. “It’s the story told44 in the songs that I like,” she explained to Henley. Within a short period of time, Waters began drawing in new customers. Some of the old crowd from Barney Gordon’s in Philadelphia came. Downtown whites also started coming to Edmond’s.
Her schedule at Edmond’s—six nights a week, three or sometimes four shows a night—left her little free time. “I used to work45 from nine to unconscious,” she said. During her off-hours, she liked to catch the drag shows in Harlem—those elaborate musicals where gorgeous women were revealed to be delicate or robust young men, sumptuously glammed up in wigs, makeup, and fabulous gowns to look like the goddesses they believed they were. Waters even lent some of the men her costumes to wear at the shows. Other times she liked to zip off to Coney Island not only for the rides but to see the freak shows too. The bearded ladies. The midgets. The two-ton fat men. On other occasions, she went to see other entertainers in shows at the clubs or ballrooms.
Though Waters grew fond of Edmond and once said that her first year at his club was one of her happiest, in time she clashed with her boss, whose determination to control her—as well as his basic crudeness—led to fights and quarrels. On one occasion, when he slapped her on her backside, she responded by kicking him on his. Another time, he stopped her in the middle of a performance and insisted that she stop singing the blues. Another performer might have wilted, but Ethel told him—in front of everyone in the club—that these were the songs people wanted to hear. Still, he insisted he didn’t want to hear them, but after customers started walking out of the club, he relented and told her to go back to the blues.
During the summers when New York clubs and theaters were not air-conditioned, when there seemed to be no relief from the sweltering heat and the deadening humidity, everything in the city’s entertainment world slowed down. Clubs like Edmond’s temporarily closed up shop. Johnson packed his bags and took himself and Ethel and some of his other entertainers to Atlantic City, where he leased a club called the Boathouse for the summer. Waters was glad to still be working, but she complained about the musical accompaniment at the Boathouse, which was a bigger arena. A small combo might work in a tiny club, but not here. When she asked Edmond to give her a larger backup of musicians, an argument ensued. Edmond wouldn’t budge. Finally, Ethel walked out on him and went to perform at a Black club called Egg Harbor, then landed at Rafe’s Paradise where the patrons were white. In the band at Rafe’s was her uncle Harry Waters, playing mandolin. Not only did the swells turn up at Rafe’s Paradise but other celebrities came to see her, including Bert Williams and Sophie Tucker, who was known as a “coon shouter.” So impressed was Tucker that she paid Waters to come to her hotel and give her lessons in this new style of singing.
In the autumn, Ethel returned to Edmond’s Cellar. Word spread, and more whites from downtown, elegantly turned out in their tailored suits and their glitzy gowns and jewels, ventured to 132nd and Fifth to hear this colored woman’s distinct style and sound. So did some of the biggest names in Black show business. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Florence Mills. The team of Buck and Bubbles. The comedy team of Butterbeans and Susie. In time she became friends with the comedy team, who offstage were Mr. and Mrs. Joe Edwards. Neither Edmond nor upper Fifth Avenue had ever seen anything like it. Ethel would become annoyed with Edmond and leave to perform elsewhere. But, eventually, she would return. “For three years, Ethel46 Waters packed his basement and made it one of Harlem’s landmarks,” said the writer Geraldyn Dismond. “From an obscure colored cabaret she turned it into an institution which was patronized by all the smart people of Gotham. In speaking of her three years with Edmund, Miss Waters laughingly admitted that she only quit him three times.”
During the time Ethel had first worked in New York at LeRoy’s Cabaret, she had attended a performance of a dazzling dancer, Ethel Williams, and her partner Rufus Greenlee at a Harlem ballroom. Immediately struck by the young woman, Ethel returned to see her perform on other occasions, and a friendship developed.
Considered one of the best dancers around who was known by everyone in Black showbiz circles, Ethel Williams had been on the scene for over ten years. “The Williams woman is47 almost white,” was the way one observer described her, with the “form of a Venus and the eyes of a devil.” Her breakthrough came in the J. Leubrie Hill show Darkto
wn Follies, which had opened at the Lafayette Theatre in 1913. Not only did it play “to great local crowds48,” James Weldon Johnson recalled, but it also “brought Broadway to Harlem.” It “became the vogue to go to Harlem to see it,” said Johnson. “This was the beginning of the nightly migration to Harlem in search of entertainment.”
Legendary producer Florenz Ziegfeld was so taken with Darktown Follies that he optioned parts of it for his own Follies downtown. He included the big number “After the Ball,” which had closed Darktown’s first act. “The whole company formed an endless chain that passed before the footlights and behind the scenes,” said James Weldon Johnson, “round and round, singing and executing a movement from a dance called ‘ballin’ the jack,’ one of those Negro dances which periodically come along and sweep the country. This finale was one of the greatest hits the Ziegfeld Follies ever had.” When Ziegfeld included the number in his show, he didn’t credit creator J. Leubrie Hill, nor did he use any of the great Black dancers. But Ziegfeld hired Ethel Williams to come downtown and teach the steps to his white chorus girls. Williams also performed with dancer Rufus Greenlee at top theaters on the Keith circuit. She and Waters had also worked together in Hello, 1919, and her career had been in high gear until she was sidetracked by an injury. After pricking her foot on a nail file, Williams had suffered blood poisoning. An operation left her in pain. Afterward, she became depressed. Reclusive and no doubt lonely, she grew fearful that she would never appear on a dance floor again. Williams’ mother pleaded with friends to try to cheer her daughter up, Waters recalled.
Visiting the young woman, Waters grew close to her and set out to help Williams reestablish her dance career. When she approached Edmond about giving Williams work, he just about laughed in her face. But Waters offered to let him cut her pay by $10 a week, which he could then put into Williams’ weekly salary. Edmond hired her. Onstage, Waters and Williams did a routine together. Offstage, they were inseparable. The friendship did not go unnoticed. As singer Alberta Hunter would later say, Ethel Williams was known as Ethel Waters’ girlfriend. Or sometimes as “one of her girlfriends.”
Still seeking control in her life, control over her circumstances, control over the people she dealt with, Waters may have been drawn to Williams because of the dancer’s professional self-doubts and insecurities. And in all likelihood, Ethel had no fears of Williams abandoning her. She could mother or baby Williams if she chose. She could lay down the rules, too. Waters also liked the idea that Williams was socially at ease in a way that she herself was not at that time. Whether it was the dictys or other big-name stars, Waters admitted not knowing what to say to some of them when they came backstage to congratulate her on a performance or invited her to socialize. Williams, however, had no such problems. No one ever thought twice as to whether the women were lovers. In showbiz circles, it was obvious that they were.
Despite the crowds at Edmond’s, Waters was growing restless and even weary of her club work, with its unending grind of several performances a night—in a smoke-filled, alcohol-fueled atmosphere with men who sometimes got out of hand. Edmond himself remained difficult and demanding. She thought she saw an escape when news broke of a Black show about to be produced. Originally called Mayor of Jimtown, it was later renamed Shuffle Along with music by Black composers Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake and a rowdy book by the popular comedy team of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. Willing to do almost anything to get into the show, Ethel was ready to accept even a spot in the chorus. But the producers of Shuffle Along were notorious for preferring light-skinned chorines. Blues singer Alberta Hunter never got over her disappointment at not being able to get into Shuffle Along—and was quick to let everyone know that she blamed Noble Sissle, who had a “color complex49” and considered her “too dark to be in his show.” “I lived to tell him what I thought about him,” she later said. Josephine Baker also tried out for one of the road show versions of the musical but was turned down, she said, because she was “too young . . . too small50, too thin, too dark.” Wearing light face powder, Baker later re-auditioned for the show and was finally hired, but as a dresser backstage. She landed a spot in the chorus only after substituting for a chorus girl who couldn’t make it to a performance. But Ethel wasn’t even able to do that. Successful as she was uptown, she wasn’t considered “classy” enough for a big Broadway show. To Shuffle Along’s producers, she was nothing more than a low-down honky-tonk singer. When Shuffle Along ended up becoming a huge hit, her disappointment was all the greater. So was her resentment.
But Ethel Waters’ consolation for having missed out on Shuffle Along was something called the race record, which would dramatically change her career and her life. Since the advent of the phonograph record, music companies had produced recordings exclusively for mainstream audiences, mainly white audiences. Record companies weren’t interested in colored singers, even though everyone in New York and Chicago knew the most innovative music, whether it be the blues or jazz, was coming from Negro artists. But music executives did not believe there was a Negro market that would buy colored music. Then, in 1920, the white Okeh Recording Company signed the singer Mamie Smith. The full-figured Smith was appearing at the Lincoln Theatre in a revue, Maid of Harlem, by Perry Bradford.
When Smith recorded “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” news traveled in the Negro community that a colored girl had cracked open the door of the music industry to become, in the words of W. C. Handy, “the first colored girl51 to make a record.” But Okeh did nothing to push her records or even to record Smith again. Only after the company failed to get white blues mama Sophie Tucker to record (the same woman who paid Ethel Waters for style lessons), did Okeh bring Mamie back into the studio. This time around, she sang “Crazy Blues”—with a flip side “It’s Right Here for You.” Black record buyers liked what they heard, and soon they were snapping up the Smith recordings. Some 75,000 copies flew off the shelves in Harlem in the first month. A music star was born. So was a music movement.
Afterward other record companies, out to duplicate Okeh’s success, recorded other colored performers singing the blues. Women such as Edith Wilson, Lucille Hegamin, and Gertrude Saunders, who had won the plum lead in Shuffle Along, were actually vaudeville performers who might use a blues song in their acts but who were basically singing pop tunes. Others, like Trixie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, Sara Martin, Victoria Spivey, and Clara Smith, who had been called a “coon shouter,” were authentic blues singers who found themselves in demand. Still others, like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, who were signed once the rush had taken off, were actually classic blues divas, the greatest.
In their music, the blues singers examined the issues: they might sing about money, heartache, or men. Sometimes they were disseminators of news, as Ida Cox proved in her song “Broadcast Blues.” Or sometimes they might just dish out some sex. Theirs were tales of women tied to oppressive men. Yet men also completed the stories of their lives. In the game of gender and sexual politics, the blues singers ultimately won because they lived to tell the tale—from their perspectives. With their bawdy material, they could reverse gender roles, demanding sex when they wanted and on their terms. Bessie Smith made that loud and clear in her song “Do Your Duty,” in which she insisted that a fellow do what was required of him: if she called for him three times a day to chase her blues away, then he should do his duty. Jazz historian Sally Placksin said that “once they’d drawn the52 world in as commiserators and conspirators, they managed to conquer—or at least diminish—the very plight (or truly celebrate the joys) of which they sang. They may have been abandoned, hopeless, too passive even for suicide. . . . They may have been making a strong statement, as in Bessie Smith’s ‘Poor Man’s Blues’ or Victoria Spivey’s ‘T. B. Blues.’ But even if they had nothing else in the world—no other love, no other hope, no other platform—they had their song, and for the moment, they had power. With their singing of the song came the very antidote to the
plague of the blues.” With such music, the blues singers brought Black women from behind the shadows and positioned them front and center in the music industry and American popular culture. Black record buyers responded enthusiastically. Eventually, so did whites.
But it all started with Mamie Smith, and Mamie’s success was not lost on Ethel, who would actually help lead the way to the blues explosion before some of those other singers snared their recording contracts. Whether Ethel actively sought a record deal is not clear, but she certainly was ready for one and probably was putting out feelers. When a scout from Cardinal Records heard her, he brought her to the attention of the company, which quickly signed her up. At Cardinal Records, she made her first recordings in 1921: “The New York Glide” and “At the New Jump Steady Ball,” backed by the group Albury’s Blue and Jazz Seven. But Cardinal was a small outfit without the muscle to promote her or even record her in the best way. Waters left the label.
