by Donald Bogle
“Before they left New York63, they undoubtedly performed various gigs of which there is no surviving record,” said Fletcher Henderson authority Walter Allen. “The nucleus of the band did record three instrumental numbers under Ethel Waters’ name but without vocals.”
Once the tour began with a quick stop in Washington, D.C., Ethel was in high gear. Traveling on the road was now second nature to her, and throughout Harry Pace used his business and marketing skills to pave the way for her arrival in one city after another. Shrewdly, he enlisted the network of Negro newspapers—such as the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the New York Age—to cover the tour, to build up Ethel even more, to make her seem all the more a larger-than-life being who had deigned to descend from a world up high to meet her subjects. As early as October 1921, an ad in the Chicago Defender announced:
Coming Your Way64— Black Swan Troubadours
Featuring the Famous phonographic star ETHEL WATERS
The World’s Greatest “Blues” Singer and Her Black Swan Jazz Masters,
Company of All-Star Colored Artists.
Exclusive Artists of the Only Colored Phonograph Record Company.
Lodge, Clubs Societies and Managers wire or write terms and open time.
T. V. Holland, Mgr. 275 W. 138 St, New York City.
Pace also enlisted Lester Walton to serve as booking agent and publicist. Walton proved to be a master at keeping the Negro press informed of all that transpired on the road, not an easy feat, what with the constant changes and new schedules. Pace and Walton both understood that Ethel was the drawing card, and there had to be an ongoing publicity campaign that highlighted her activities. Neither man concocted any publicity stunts, but they were aware of the curiosity about this good-looking young woman’s romantic life, which they had to make use of. Consequently, among the publicity “leaks” sent to the Negro press was the “revelation” of an unusual agreement between Waters and Black Swan. “Ethel Must Not Marry65—Signs Contact For Big Salary—Providing She Does Not Marry Within A Year,” read the headline in the Chicago Defender.
Ethel Waters, star of the Black Swan Troubadours, has signed a unique contract with Harry H. Pace, which stipulates that she is not to marry for at least a year, and that during this period she is to devote her time largely to singing for Black Swan records and appearing with the Troubadours. It was due to numerous offers of marriage, many of her suitors suggesting that she give up her professional life at once for domesticity, that Mr. Pace was prompted to make this step.
The article also stated: “Miss Waters’ contract makes her now the highest salaried colored phonograph star in the country.” All of this made terrific copy, depicting Waters as a sexy singer hotly pursued by numerous men on the make. For those who would come to see the woman they had been reading about, the publicity was beginning to turn her into a legendary (even at this early time in her career) phenomenon. Though some items probably padded Ethel’s already growing ego, she must have howled over some of the copy that she read about herself. The truth of the matter was that Ethel, though still pursued by any number of men, some perhaps with honorable intentions, others clearly without, had no plans whatsoever for marriage. Among the creature comforts that Waters made sure to have with her on the road were her Pekinese named Bubbles and her lover, the sprightly dancer Ethel Williams, who was signed to perform with the company.
First stop after Washington—on November 23—was Waters’ old stomping grounds, the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia. Located at 1124-1128 South Street, the Standard had originally been the South Street Baptist Church. Then in 1889, architect Jacob J. Hitchler converted the church into a theater that extended 120 feet to Kater Street and was designed with an orchestra level, a balcony, a gallery, and deluxe box seats. The stage itself was forty feet deep and seventy-eight feet wide from wall to wall. Its proscenium opening was thirty-two feet wide and forty-two feet high. From 1897 to 1900, the Standard Theatre Stock Company was in residence.
Then in 1915, Philadelphia impresario John Gibson bought the place and turned it into a vaudeville house. In 1920, after new seats and new lighting fixtures were installed, it was promoted as Gibson’s New Standard Theatre. Gibson also owned Philadelphia’s other major Black vaudeville houses: the Dunbar on Broad and Lombard streets, and the Royal, also located on South Street. All three theaters, along with the numerous clubs, bars, and music haunts around town, made Philadelphia a great location for musicians and entertainers. Stock companies like the Lafayette Players in New York came to town with their productions, giving the locals the chance to see what the big-timers could do. But the Standard was Philadelphia’s premier establishment for Black vaudeville. It seated some fifteen hundred people, and over the years, legendary performers would showcase their talents on that large stage: great acts like Louis Armstrong, Adelaide Hall, Buck and Bubbles, and the comic Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham. Sitting in the audience to watch rehearsals and performances during this period was a wide-eyed little boy named Fayard Nicholas, who with his baby brother Harold grew up to become part of the famous dancing Nicholas Brothers. His father, the drummer Ulysses Nicholas, led the band at the Standard, and his mother, Viola, played the piano there. When Ethel had played the Standard in 1918, she had felt pretty good about herself, about the fact that folks in town had seen she had made something of herself. But now she came back as a recording star and a big attraction on a bill that headlined former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson.
Gibson had scheduled the show during Thanksgiving week in order to cash in on the crowds of Black Americans who were pouring into the City of Brotherly Love for the big football game between Howard and Lincoln universities. These were two of Black America’s great institutions of higher education, and their gridiron battles always drew record turnouts of both the high and low in the African American community. The city’s Negro newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune, called the game the “Greatest Social Event66 of [the] Year” and predicted “20,000 People Will Attend The Great Football Classic.” It was Black America’s equivalent of the Army-Navy game that excited mainstream America. Gibson knew the football fans would want other activities while in the city, and thus they could head to the Standard. Here Gibson had been shrewd. The December 9, 1921, edition of Variety would report that approximately twelve thousand entertainment acts had been out of work in 1920. Affected by the popularity of movies and radio, vaudeville would continue for some years, but in hopes of boosting attendance, agents were now booking famous athletes in theaters. Gibson had signed Johnson, confident the champ would pack ’em in. By now, Johnson’s fighting days were over, and there would be both pleasure and sadness in seeing him.
Born John Arthur Johnson in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, he had a storied life. Quitting school after the fifth grade, he worked a series of menial jobs. But fascinated by prizefighting, delighting in his innate abilities at the sport, Johnson began training, then became a professional in 1897 at the age of nineteen. Quickly rising up the ranks, he defeated one Black boxer after another, and by 1903 was considered the “unofficial” colored heavyweight champ. Too ambitious to stop there, Johnson knew that in order to make it as a great boxer on the national scene, he had to fight the white champs, but none would go near him. Such fighters as John L. Sullivan and Jim Jeffries turned him down, but in 1908, he finally got a bout with white heavyweight boxer Tommy Burns—in Sydney, Australia. Defeating Burns, Johnson instantly became a hero for Black America and a nightmare for the rest of the nation. During the next two years, he fought five other bouts with white boxers, and he defeated them all. In the ring, there was nothing humble or subservient about him. Proud and defiant, he was known for taunting his opponents. Considered the “Great White Hope,” Tommy Burns was pressured to come out of retirement and enter the ring with Johnson for a rematch. Again Johnson pummeled him, but this time in the States—in Reno, Nevada, in 1910. Afterward there were race riots.
Outside the ring, Johnson also shocked his fello
w countrymen when, in 1911, he married a white woman, Terry Duryea, who later committed suicide. Johnson took a second white wife, Lucille Cameron; then, in 1913, he was convicted of violating the Mann Act: transporting women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” It didn’t seem to matter that Johnson had married the women he transported; the marriages themselves were considered immoral. To avoid prison, Johnson moved to France, where he conducted boxing exhibitions, but the lure of the ring led him to a bout in Havana with Jess Willard in 1915. Johnson lost. He eventually returned to the States and served a year in prison. Afterward he ran the Club Deluxe in New York, which he later sold and which was transformed into the Cotton Club. Johnson also turned to public appearances. The roar of the crowd, screaming his name and cheering him on, was now something he thrived on. And so he turned up on the bill at the Standard.
For about ten cents, a patron could see a movie and a complete vaudeville show. Among the acts, there were not only big stars but the talented midlevel stars too, as well as female impersonators and animal acts. Though Johnson was clearly the draw, Gibson knew that once patrons got inside, it was the Black Swan Troubadours, led by Ethel, who would provide the real entertainment. A few days before Ethel’s arrival, the theater had taken out a large ad in the November 19 edition of the Philadelphia Tribune:
Gibson’s New Standard Theatre67
South Street at Twelfth
John T. Gibson, Sole Owner and Directing Manager
WEEK Beginning NOV. 21
GALA HOLIDAY BILL
3 Shows Thanksgiving Night 3
First Show Begins at 6 o’clock
By Special Request
JACK JOHNSON
In PERSON
The greatest boxer of all times in one of his Clever Boxing Exhibitions.
Black Swan Troubadours
with
ETHEL WATERS
World’s greatest Blues Singer and Jazz Band
Ethel Williams and Slick White
Black Swan Records are made by the only Colored Phonograph Company in Existence.
Sandy Burns Co.
Act Entitled “Ephraim’s Got to Go”
Baker & Baker Singing, Dancing, and Pianologue
TUCKER & GRESHAM
Clever Arrangement of Comedy and Song
Slayter & Hollins. Song, Dance and a Little Bit of Jazz
On opening night, the Standard was packed. A musical comedy bit was performed by blackface comedian Sandy Burns and his company. Then nonstop songs, dances, and humor were provided by such teams as Tucker and Gresham and Slayter and Hollins. Even the musicians with the Troubadours’ Jazz Masters put down their instruments at one point in the evening to do a comedy skit. “Like every band that68 got onstage,” Garvin Bushell recalled, “we had to do a specialty of some kind. So we had an act in which I was a cop and [drummer Raymond] Green was a preacher. He’d be standing there on the street preaching at what looked like an altar, but it would be his xylophone, covered up. I’d come out in a cop uniform and chase him off the street. Ray Green was a very funny character, and a good drummer, too.” When Jack Johnson came on, the applause was thunderous. Johnson performed a funny burlesque of a fight with Sandy Burns, but mainly it was a personal appearance. “He did some69 shadow boxing and some talking. People just wanted to look at him,” said Bushell.
But the performance at the Standard—the one audiences wouldn’t forget—was Ethel with the Black Swan Troubadours. Pepped up and ready for action, she was dressed—throughout the tour—to the nines, usually in long gowns and perhaps what would be her trademark, dangling earrings that sparkled and brought light to her face. “She literally sang with70 a smile,” reminisced Garvin Bushell, “which made her voice sound wide and broad.”
At the Standard and throughout other cities on the tour, she must have been surprised to discover that, because of the recordings, she was accorded a new level of respect. To record buyers and soon those patrons who would pack the theaters and clubs where she now performed, she was like a goddess touched by the magic of mysterious modern technology. Not yet were recordings fully taken for granted. The entire technical process of making a record, just like making a movie, mystified everyone. How was it done? Much like early movies, which audiences took literally (ducking when a train raced toward them on the big screen) and whose stars were viewed as godlike or goddessy beings—hordes of ordinary folk went into a frenzy at seeing Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, or Douglas Fairbanks in person—so too did early Black recording stars like Ethel seem touched by unfathomable powers. Glamorous photographs or posters were in the lobby of a theater, as again Harry Pace showed his business and marketing skills.
For Ethel, the tour would expose her to the full extent of her fame. People could go into a dither at merely seeing her. All the commotion might have thrown someone else. Indeed show business was littered with performers unable to cope with or understand or feel deserving of their fame. But Waters adjusted very quickly. Fame became a second skin to her, and that adjustment started with the engagement at the Standard.
There also had to be a great satisfaction that her family and the old crowd from Chester and Clifton Street were more aware than ever that Ethel, once Sweet Mama Stringbean, had attained a new level of stardom. Perhaps that hincty grandmother Lydia Waters was aware of her success. Yet for Ethel there would always be a nagging sadness that Sally Anderson had not lived to see any of this—Sally, the one person who had always believed in her.
In Philadelphia, she also got to know Johnson. Ethel was impressed; however, she kept her distance. After all, this was the man known to have no interest in Black women; his marriages were an open affront to them. Yet any number of Black women pursued him at the Standard. For his part, Johnson was intrigued by Ethel, who could perform up a storm and have the crowd cheering but who had nothing to say to him. Backstage she always greeted him cordially. But she said little else. One afternoon he sent his valet to her dressing room with an invitation for her to come see the champ. “All right71,” she told the valet, “it is exactly the same number of steps from his dressing room to mine as it is from mine to his. So tell him to drop over.” Unaccustomed to being treated in such a way, Johnson nonetheless showed up in the doorway of her dressing room and asked if he could come in. Why was she unfriendly to him, he wanted to know. Their conversation turned to the subject of white women and his lack of interest in African American ones. Johnson responded that he had nothing against Black women. He also invited her to dinner, which she declined. But now they were on friendly terms, and at other times in other cities, the two would run into each other, and each time, Johnson and Waters had friendly conversations. Often he flirted. “I could like a72 woman like you, Ethel,” he would say. “Now, Jack,” Waters would respond.
In the end, Ethel liked him and felt she understood his predilection for white women. No doubt to the dismay of other African Americans, she once said, “I guess we Negro women could take lessons from white women and light-colored women. We might learn a lot about flattering the vanity of our men, catering and playing up to them more.” Part of Johnson’s appeal to Ethel may have been the way he handled his unprecedented fame, his defiance in the face of a racist culture that tried to cut him down at every opportunity. Part of his appeal also was his sheer physical power. Boxers—prizefighters—would always draw something out of her that others could not. Even that early boyfriend, with whom she had sparred, had a strength she admired. In the years to come, her admiring eyes would turn to another famous prizefighter, Joe Louis.
After his gig at the Standard, Johnson performed at other theaters. His business ventures continued. In 1924, he took a third white wife, Irene Pineau. Still a hero for Black America, Johnson was killed in an automobile accident in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1946.
Next stop for the Troubadours was a three-day engagement at the Regent Theatre in Baltimore. “Preceding Miss Waters’ appearance73 her eight jazz boys treated the audience to as fine an exh
ibition of jazz playing as have [sic] ever been heard here white or black,” the Baltimore Afro-American reported. “When Miss Waters—a stately very handsome young woman of a real ‘teasing brown’ complexion—made her appearance beautifully gowned in a costume of blue pan velvet and gold brocade, the audience burst into prolonged applause.”
Following Baltimore, she was off on a series of whirlwind one-nighters in Pennsylvania and Ohio, hitting one city after another at breakneck speed. “We didn’t play any74 white theaters with Ethel, only ballrooms or TOBA theaters, and then, naturally, we went on after the movie,” Garvin Bushell recalled. “We made about fifty dollars a week, I guess. Conditions of traveling didn’t bother us too much, I guess. If you had to walk the streets all night or sleep in a church, you did it. Sometimes we couldn’t get a room and we’d have to call up the Black preacher. He’d say, ‘Well, you can sleep over in the church. I’ll send the janitor down and he’ll open it up. You can sleep on the benches there until you get ready when your train comes in.’ We also stayed in Black hotels and in people’s houses. In Dayton we stayed in a rooming house, I remember. Or they’d have a family picked out, and say, ‘You can go to 24 Dearborn Street.’ Accommodations in Negro neighborhoods could be lousy—with bad food and a lot of bedbugs. But being young, we didn’t care. We were having a ball on the road.”
