by Donald Bogle
During those first days on the road, there was no time to get to know those cities. Ethel would often leave one place in the morning, arrive in another in the afternoon or the next day, and then be ready to go on that night. After that performance, there might be parties and get-togethers, and some carousing. The musicians were always ready to meet the local girls. And there might be scrapes with the law. But by the next morning, everything would have to be worked out, and everyone would have to be packed up and ready for the next move.
While the company was in Pittsburgh, Lester Walton arrived from New York. From there, he traveled with the Troubadours, publicizing them, serving as an advance man and road manager, making sure theaters were in order and money was paid, and then setting up new engagements and accommodations as they went along.
Around Christmas, the troupe appeared at the Lincoln Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, and then on New Year’s Day, at the Booker T. Washington Theatre in St. Louis. Located on a cobblestone street at 23rd and Market, the Booker T. Washington was promoted as the “home of Mirth, Music, and Merriment.” Like the Standard, the Booker T. Washington held memories for another rising star, soon to be a rival of Waters. The young Freda J. McDonald, daughter of a washerwoman and a father she didn’t know, had sat in this theater—sometimes playing hooky from school to do so—observing great colored acts, longing for some of the magic to rub off on her. Her first appearances as a teenager were here at the Booker T. Washington. Then she ran off with a colored troupe. Later known as Josephine Baker, she became a major star. But when Waters performed at the Booker T. Washington, she knew none of this. The main thing on her mind was to give the audience a raucous good time. “Congratulations on your wonderful75 show,” C. H. Turner, the manager of the theater, quickly telegraphed Harry Pace.
In mid-January, Waters arrived in Chicago for appearances at the Grand Theatre. Full of clubs, theaters, and innovative, ambitious musicians, Chicago was then a major music center for African American performers. One of the first stops of Blacks from the South on their Great Migration odyssey, the city had more than 150,000 Black residents in 1920 and was sometimes called the Promised Land. All the big names passed through at some point. Success there was as important as making it in New York. Performances at the Grand not only held the promise of luring in big crowds but also of greater record sales for Black Swan. Lester Walton had come to town early, on January 3, 1922, to prepare for the engagement and drum up some press. Black Swan pulled out all the stops. An ad in the Chicago Defender on January 14 announced the big event:
One week only—Starting Monday76, January 16 . . . Walton & Pace present the Black Swan Troubadours featuring Ethel Waters—World’s Greatest Singer of Blues and Her Jazz Masters, New York’s Leading Exponents of Syncopation. Also Ethel Williams and Froncell Manley in a whirlwind Dancing Specialty. Grand Theatre, State @ 31st, Chicago, Nightly at 8:30.
Ethel spent some time with blues singer Alberta Hunter, with whom she had become friendly and who was briefly under contract to Black Swan before moving on to Paramount Records. At the age of twelve, this Memphis-born daughter of a chambermaid and a father who was a Pullman porter had run away to come to Chicago where she had heard that singers made $10 a week. Small, pixieish, but also feisty, Hunter started performing in a honky-tonk that was little more than a brothel where sporting people came for entertainment. Afterward, she moved from one club to another, working her way up the entertainment ladder. With hits like “How Long, Sweet Daddy, How Long?” she personified the sexually assertive young woman but also the vulnerable one whose heart could so easily break. “When she sang the77 blues,” Eubie Blake said of Hunter, “you felt so sorry for her you would want to kill the guy she was singing about.” In 1923, she would write the Bessie Smith hit “Down-Hearted Blues,” which sold some 800,000 copies in less than six months. “Made me a little change, too,” Hunter said, referring to her royalties for the song. Like Waters, she also gave Sophie Tucker lessons on how to put a number across, in this case “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” And in the late 1920s, she would board an ocean liner to sail to England to appear as Queenie opposite Paul Robeson in Show Boat on London’s West End. In a career that would span seven decades, Hunter appeared throughout the States and abroad and worked with such stars as Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Fats Waller, and Lil Armstrong.
One evening, Waters arrived with Ethel Williams for a dinner at Hunter’s apartment on Prairie Avenue. The night had to be an unusual one for Hunter because she was hardly known for giving dinner parties. Most likely, Black Swan’s publicity people had a hand in the evening. What could be better promotion than the idea of two Black Swan performers breaking bread with a group of friends during their downtime? What was not reported, however, was that also in attendance was Carrie Mae Ward, who was then Hunter’s live-in girlfriend.
Waters and Hunter appeared to be relatively open with one another about their same-sex relationships. Show business was full of such liaisons, but they had far different attitudes about appropriate behavior with one’s companions. For the sedate and reticent Hunter, discretion was of the utmost importance. Ethel, however, had other ideas. If one of Ethel’s girlfriends did something that annoyed or even mildly bothered her, she didn’t waste any time in letting her know it, and she didn’t care who was around to hear her. Hunter cringed on those occasions when Ethel publicly got into fights with one of her girlfriends. “What will people say79?” Alberta would ask. No doubt Waters’ response would have been something along the lines of: “What the hell do I care what some son of a bitch might say!” Waters’ attitude was similar to that of Bessie Smith. Yet both Bessie and Waters kept such public displays confined to show business folk.
Though Waters probably felt comfortable around Hunter because of their mutual sapphic preferences, she would have an off-and-on, occasionally turbulent, friendship with Alberta Hunter for years. Sometimes Waters was agreeable and fun. Sometimes she could even be kind and would invite Hunter to stay at her home. But other times, as Hunter later revealed, Ethel was short-tempered, even mean. And always, she called the shots. She believed Alberta was talented and consequently accorded her a certain respect, but the queenly competitive Ethel already knew that Alberta was not in her league. For her part, Hunter harbored no illusions of grandeur. She knew she was no match for Waters. Or Bessie Smith. But in 1922, Hunter felt a professional rivalry, and many believed that Hunter “was disenchanted with Black Swan for doing so little prom-otion of her records in contrast with the big buildup it was giving Ethel Waters.”
The Grand Booking was another hit. “The work of the80 Black Swan Jazz Band is worth the price of admission,” the Chicago Defender exclaimed on January 21. Afterward Ethel and company were held over “by popular demand” for a second week. But before the engagement ended, Ethel was faced with a problem that threatened to close down the tour. Following the next engagements in the Midwest, Lester Walton and Pace had added Southern cities. Pace wanted to make inroads into this important market, those Southern Black belts where Black audiences were in need of entertainment and more records might be sold. But four of the tour’s musicians—Bushell, the Aiken brothers, and Charles Jackson—balked about the new schedule. In 1920, fifty-three lynchings had been reported. In 1921, fifty-nine were counted. “In those days81,” recalled Bushell, “you went South at the risk of your life. It would be very uncomfortable, very miserable touring the South then. So many incidents occurred. You weren’t even treated as a human being.”
The situation reached a crisis when the four men decided to drop out of the tour. A meeting was called with the entire company. Naturally, Lester Walton was the man in charge who all the guys looked up to, but at a crucial point, Ethel stepped forward. She let the musicians express their feelings, then she pointedly asked the rest of the company if anyone else wanted to leave the tour. No one else responded. Waters ended the discussion by telling the musicians that she understood that traveling in the South could be treacherous, but th
at was not going to stop her from taking her music to her people. “She felt it her duty82 to make sacrifices,” the Chicago Defender reported, “in order that members of her Race might hear her sing a style of music which is a product of the Southland.” Afterward four new musicians were hired. The publicity following in the wake of the musicians’ walkout worked to Waters’ advantage. The Black press was now ready to depict her as a fiery young woman—a Race Woman—who was doing something for the Negro and who wouldn’t be held back from anything because of some dimwitted crackers below the Mason-Dixon line. “Ethel Waters is on her way Southward,” wrote the Chicago Defender. “She has made up her mind to appear before Colored audiences in Dixie, and says it will take more than members of her company to quit before she changes her mind about visiting the Southern states.”
The blatant racism of the South was no different than it had been when Waters first traveled with the Hill Sisters, no different from the time of that automobile accident in Birmingham. But it was a fact of life she had to work her way around. She’d fight when she had to, but she also knew which battles to wage.
Afterward, the company hit the Orpheum in Gary, Indiana, and Emery Hall in Cincinnati; followed by the Palace Theatre in Memphis; then on to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, for two days; then Little Rock, Hot Springs, and Fort Smith in February. Bookings in Oklahoma—Muskogee, Ardmore—followed. Then it was on to Texas—Paris, Fort Worth, Waco, Dallas, Austin, Galveston, and Houston. In parts of the South, she saw glimmers of change. Shortly before the group arrived in Paris, Texas, a lynching had occurred, and everyone was obviously tense and anxious. The hardest thing was that none of the Troubadours could really say anything or openly protest. Yet the whites they encountered in Paris seemed cordial and friendly. The Troubadours even performed at a dance attended by both white and colored. In Houston, the Troubadours were stranded. Nothing new about that for showbiz folk, but they got out of the city safe and sound.
For Ethel, a significant sign of some change in the South occurred once the tour reached New Orleans in April for a week’s engagement at the Lyric Theatre. “It has been voted83 the cleanest and strongest company of vaudeville performers offered at the Lyric in a long time,” wrote the New York Age on April 29, 1922. Waters broke attendance records at the theater. So much talk about the troupe spread that one of the city’s big daily papers, the New Orleans Item, invited “the company’s star and its jazz band to go to its office on Friday night and have their work radio phoned all over the city and the surrounding territory.” With Henderson and the Jazz Masters, Ethel would be broadcast over WVG radio. This fast-growing medium of radio was already proving important to performers. But African Americans would have a long struggle to get a foothold in the medium. Thus the invitation to perform on WVG was surprising. So, too, was the behavior of the station’s representative. Members of the band entered through the back of the building into the studio, but Waters and Lester Walton were led through the front entrance.
For Ethel, the experience of standing before the “live” mike had to be reminiscent of her first day in the recording studio. The radio technician had to position her. Someone else had to explain what her cue would be. Another had to indicate when she should go soft with the volume, when she should turn up the heat. Again she had to imagine the audience out there. No matter how good she was, there would be no applause. If she fell flat on her face, there would not even be any boos. And whether she liked it or not, felt comfortable with it or not, she would be playing on the “white time,” which meant mainly for white listeners, not Black ones. No doubt her nerves were on end, but whatever her fears or anxieties, she, Henderson, and the guys in the band were ready for their cue. With this first appearance, she learned—quick study that she always was—to work in yet another new medium.
The next morning, Ethel woke up to see that the New Orleans Item ran a front-page article, informing its readers of the way Waters and company had “stirred” radio fans. “The concert was heard84 in five states and in Mexico and thousands of radio fans listened to a colored girl sing through the air,” the Savannah Tribune reported. “Miss Waters, who has broken many records on this trip, adds another star to her laurels by being the first colored girl to sing over the radio.” On that Saturday night, Ethel and the others were invited to be guests of honor at a special event in the Red Room of the city’s Astoria Hotel.
While in New Orleans, Henderson almost signed up a new member for his Jazz Masters. “I heard this young man85 playing trumpet in a little dance hall,” Henderson recalled. “I decided that that youthful trumpeter would be great in our act. I asked him his name and found he was Louis Armstrong. Louis told me that he would have to speak to his drummer, because he couldn’t possibly leave without him. The next day, Louis was backstage at the theater to tell me that he’d have to be excused, much as he would love to go with us, because the drummer [Zutty Singleton] wouldn’t leave New Orleans.”
From New Orleans, Waters and company continued on to Birmingham, then to stops in Tennessee and Georgia. While in Macon, Georgia, Ethel witnessed a shocking incident that turned her stomach and made her realize the South could still be a treacherous, deadly place. Shortly before Ethel’s performance, the body of a young Black boy was dumped in the lobby of the theater. He had been lynched because he had “talked back” to a white man. “They threw it there to make sure many Negroes would see it,” she said. She spoke to the boy’s family, and later she relived the horror of seeing that lynched boy’s body to give emotional definition to one of her greatest songs, Irving Berlin’s “Supper Time.”
The company traveled on—to Columbia, South Carolina, and then the Academy of Music in Wilmington, North Carolina. In these cities, neither fans nor the Negro press had seen anything like this show. “Ethel Waters and her86 jazz masters have come and gone but their memory will linger for months,” wrote Wilmington’s newspaper, the Dispatch. “The Black Swan Troubadours played an engagement at the Academy of Music last night and were so much better than had been expected [that] the crowd was left wide eyed and gasping with astonishment and delight for the company has class written all over it.” The Dispatch added: “Ethel Waters’ blues numbers closed the program and with her jazz masters under perfect control and rendering jazz music that is only possible with Negro artists, she backed all colored competitors who have ever appeared here completely off the boards. The Waters aggregation is in a class to itself. It is so much better than other colored shows that have appeared here that a comparison is unfair to others.” Also singled out was Ethel Williams, who was called “a dancer of more ability than two-thirds of those who have ever played Wilmington. Her act, including shimmies and shivers, is done with Roscoe Wickman and it sent [the] crowd into paroxysm of the wildest delight. . . . She lifted the audience up and up until it literally overflowed with delight.” Such praise simply confirmed what most on the tour knew, that Williams was a gifted artist who had regained her confidence.
From Wilmington, the company moved on to Norfolk and Richmond, to Baltimore, and the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C. By the end of June, Ethel was once again at the Standard in Philadelphia. By July 1922, everyone was back in New York.
For Ethel, it must have seemed as if the tour would never end. Other times, especially now that it was over, she must have felt that everything had rushed by too quickly without time to reflect on it or her life. But the Black Swan tour had altered the way she viewed herself. On the tour, she had been cheered, celebrated, adulated, and adored by audiences and the Negro press. Not only did she pack in the crowds but her records continued to sell. For her, there had been the thrill of performing, entering onstage to applause and then knocking the folks dead with her music, surprising them when she might dance, delighting them when she had a funny line or two to say. At age twenty-five, she was beginning to understand the range of her talent, the possible scope of her imagination. In those cities and towns, she could look out from the stage at those people up in the balconies who had s
aved their pennies to come see her—as well as the big shots who sat in the front rows. She loved it all. The audience in turn loved her right back and could always tell that she was giving them everything she had. The energy and wild enthusiasm were all there. Thus a legend was developing that would take hold within a few years and into the following decades: Ethel Waters looked as if she might be one of the great live performers of the twentieth century. Some recording stars, some movie stars, even some radio stars might be disappointing when standing before a large live audience, when there was no script to guide them, when there was no chance to redo a number or reshoot a scene as one could in a recording studio or on a movie set. But that was never the case with Waters. Great entertainers have to love the audience; in a sense, they have to live for the audience. That was now happening to her. Even at this early stage in her career, every person who ever saw her live in a club or theater would find her unforgettable. Waters was most at home before an audience, most alive, most composed, most confident about herself, most willing to do absolutely anything to ensure that the people out there got their money’s worth. At the end of the tour, Ethel Waters was exhausted but also ecstatic. She knew she wanted a career.
Yet, ironically, when she returned to New York, she discovered she was almost back to square one. The city had its own demands, its own standards, its own status symbols. But the important producers and the managers of the major nightclubs still considered her a low-down trashy honky-tonk singer, not much more. She also no doubt knew that a career in vaudeville might not mean what it once did. Those theaters where she had played had often shown movies, which Waters understood would emerge as the dominant form of entertainment for most of the twentieth century. Yet she was a colored girl. Could she realistically envision movies as part of her future? Broadway, however, remained vital—and might provide her with a forum. The success of Shuffle Along had given Waters and the rest of the Negro showbiz community hope that Broadway would toss down the welcome mat for Negro talent. That was the great dream: to make it on that Great White Way. The white producer Morris Guest, who first saw her perform in Atlantic City, had approached her about appearing in a white show on Broadway. The agent Jack Goldberg had wanted to represent her. The Selwyn brothers also expressed interest in her. But Ethel herself was conflicted about her goals as well as her aspirations to perform on Broadway. Even now, as popular entertainment was offering more opportunities for colored performers, she did not want to appear in white shows or nightclubs with mostly white patrons sitting there. She still preferred Negro entertainment—mainly for Negro audiences, her people. Though whites had come uptown to hear her at Edmond’s and had attended some of her shows on the Black Swan tour, she was a colored star who did not give a hoot about crossing over. The downtown whites at Edmond’s had come uptown to her turf—she had not gone to theirs. That might have to change, however, if her career was to move forward. Still, she was not ready to make that move.
