by Donald Bogle
***
In March 1923, the Pace Phonograph Company was formally renamed the Black Swan Phonograph Company. That same month, Ethel—with the Jazz Masters—recorded five new songs: “Brown Baby,” “Memphis Man,” “Midnight Blues,” “Long Lost Mamma,” and “Lost Out Blues.” Though she may not have known it at the time, these would be her last recordings for the Black Swan label. With its expansion, Black Swan looked as if it was more successful than ever, but the company was in serious trouble. Though Black Swan had been selling seven thousand records a day, its plant could press only six thousand daily. Three additional presses had been ordered in 1923, but before “they were set up92 and ready for running, radio broadcasting broke and this spelled doom for us,” said Pace. “The Black Swan Company93 had a big moment in the sun,” said W. C. Handy. “Then the competition became too swift. The Paramount Record Company and others pressed millions of records of this type through their enormous laboratory facilities, and while they were on the toboggan slide the Black Swan was doomed. The vogue passed and others folded as radio became a reality.”
“Immediately dealers began to94 cancel orders that they had placed, records were returned unaccepted, many record stores became radio stores,” said Pace, “and we found ourselves making and selling only about three thousand records daily and then it came down to one thousand, and our factory was closed for two weeks at a time, and finally the factory was sold at a sheriff’s sale and bought by a Chicago firm who made records for Sears & Roebuck Company.” Competition from radio may have been a factor in Black Swan’s ultimate demise. But recordings at other companies continued to sell well, and Black Swan had to deal with competition in signing major Black talent as blues music became more popular. The large white companies were on the prowl, snapping up blues stars, eager to make huge profits off the women. In 1923, Bessie Smith signed with Columbia. By 1924, Paramount signed performers like Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Trixie Smith, and Edmonia Henderson. The future looked bright for these singers and for the labels that recorded them. But Black Swan’s bright days came to an end.
In December, the company declared bankruptcy. Several months later, Paramount announced that it had purchased Black Swan and would carry the Black Swan catalog on its label. For a time, Ethel’s music was released on the Vocalion label, then Paramount. For Ethel, the demise of Black Swan marked the end of an era, short as it had been. She never forgot that Mr. Pace had given her the opportunity to make a name for herself and set her career in motion, but she no longer had a record company she considered her home base.
Her life changed in another significant way when she arrived in Chicago with Pearl and Ethel for an engagement at the Monogram Theatre. There, she ran into Earl Dancer, the dapper twenty-eight-year-old young man she had met in New York and long avoided. A man of many faces, Dancer had lived fast and hard, always on the go, always looking for the next outlet for his energies and his ambition. Born in Houston, Texas, around 1896, the son of John and Eliza Pruitt Dancer, Dancer—an extroverted and likable egotist—enjoyed boasting of his lineage. He came from a family—which was “mostly Cherokee Indian, yet tinged with Black and white blood”—that had high standards, which Earl, his brothers Maurice and Johnny, and his sisters Olga and Lillian, were raised to meet. Indeed, theirs was a solidly middle-class, well-tutored family, although Earl looked as if he was rebelling against it. His devout mother had visions of Earl becoming a minister. While still a boy, he was sent to live with a pastor and his wife in San Antonio. A very young Earl quickly learned that those who preached the good book didn’t always live by it. Dancer never specified how he was disillusioned by the minister, but he did not stay in San Antonio long.
Smart and good-looking, he must have taken stock of himself to figure out what he could do best and what he would enjoy doing. He had a lyrical tenor voice that he decided to put to use. Before long, he made his way to Fort Cheyenne, where he became the soloist for the 9th Cavalry. There he also became a favorite of the unit’s Colonel Young and soon was a member of the Young household. But by 1911, the fifteen-year-old Dancer moved to Denver. Performing at a theater there, he contracted pneumonia, was hospitalized, and afterward was sent to Saltillo, Mexico, to recuperate. The pneumonia had robbed him of the upper range of his voice, but he performed nonetheless at the city’s American club until the Great War broke out in 1914. At that point, he visited his mother, who was then living comfortably in Los Angeles with his stepfather, the attorney Fred Mason. At his mother’s urging, he went back to school and later enrolled at the University of Southern California. But he grew bored with his studies and left after seven months.
His next stop was San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, where he performed at a club called Purcell’s. By now, Dancer, much as he liked being onstage, also enjoyed working behind the scenes—making deals, giving orders, arranging schedules, schmoozing with big shots. Becoming the manager of the house around the age of twenty-three, he transformed Purcell’s from a local favorite into a well-known establishment that became the “ultimate” destination for show folk and tourists. One evening, the dancer Cora Green—talented, popular, and attractive—stepped into the club, took one look at the dashing Dancer, and liked what she saw: his style, his smooth way of talking, his drive. “He was very handsome95,” recalled the actor Lennie Bluett, who knew Dancer in Los Angeles. “Café-au-lait-colored with wavy New Orleans–style hair. He could have passed for Mexican or Brazilian.” Dancer never wasted time. Apparently, neither did Cora Green. Before anyone knew it, Dancer and Green were a team touring in vaudeville. Becoming headliners on the Pantages circuit, they opened with twelve weeks in Los Angeles, and for a year, shuttled back and forth across the country for performances in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
In New York, Dancer first saw Ethel in high gear at Edmond’s. Having gone to the club with a buddy, the dancer Louie Keene, he watched her from afar, struck by her talent and charisma as well as her brazen sexiness. “We heard Ethel singing96 the most suggestive song I had ever heard, even in my Barbary Coast days,” he recalled. “The song was ‘I’m Trying to Teach My Man Right from Wrong.’ Ethel sang it as only Ethel Waters can sing a song. At Edmond’s she topped off the song with a shake dance number that would put the present-day shimmy queens to shame.” Dancer, however, was not yet ready to make himself known to her. Perhaps he was biding his time. Then came the night in December 1920 when he finally met her.
“One evening after we had finished our performance at a neighborhood theater,” recalled Dancer, “Cora suggested that we catch the opening of Ethel Waters and Ethel Williams at the Libya Cabaret, then located at 138th Street and Seventh Avenue. I was thrilled by Ethel’s artistry, especially her dancing. But what impressed me most was her apparent latent talent and ability. Here was a girl, I said to myself, with an abundance of a thing we call ‘stage presence,’ a complete command of her audience even in her rendition of suggestive songs and her blues.” That night, he turned to Cora and told her, “This girl, Waters, given good clean material and competent direction, could develop into a great songstress and a wonderful entertainer.” That was the night that he finally met Ethel. “Cora introduced me to her at the Libya. I didn’t see Waters for some time after that because Cora and I were booked out of New York.”
Everything for Dancer and Cora Green, however, was suddenly cut short when he broke an arm one night while performing, and Cora went back on tour with another partner. There may have been more to the story, but this was the version Earl told. Excited by New York, he scrambled together money from backers to open an all-night club called the Golden Gate Inn. When the cast of Shuffle Along came to his club, Ethel arrived with Ethel Williams to find the place packed with patrons, Black and white. Waters had been invited to join in on the festivities by a woman named Eva Branch, who was working as the head waitress at the nightclub. Branch also had a rooming house that was popular with scores of Black stars. “The Golden Gate Inn, along with Baron Wilkin’s place and Mal Frazier
and John Carey’s Nest Club were receiving what we now call a ‘terrific play’ from the downtown carriage trade,” said Dancer. It was the kind of club where all types of lines could be crossed: racial lines, gender lines, class lines. “In my place that night of the Shuffle Along party were many Broadway celebrities.” It was also one of those nights when entertainers, among themselves, entertained one another. Such nights could be high-voltage, raucous, and good-naturedly competitive. Standing before your peers, you had to be at your best. One performer after another took center stage—while the bootleg liquor flowed and everybody went wild. Urged on by the crowd, Ethel, who loved competition, stood up and went into song. Dancer remembered that it was “no exaggeration to say that Ethel Waters topped what was unquestionably one of the greatest impromptu shows ever given in Harlem.”
“That night I made up my mind,” he recalled, “that I would do something about the great talent demonstrated by the young starlet.” Dancer finagled a meeting with Ethel to discuss her career and make a pitch for handling her. Overly confident, he was sure a deal could be cut, but he saw that Ethel had other ideas. “In a conference the next evening at Eva Branch’s home,” said Dancer, “Ethel told me she was booked to play the Theater Owners Booking Association vaudeville circuit.” Ethel was letting Dancer know she had work and didn’t need him to give her any suggestions. One can imagine how Ethel must have looked him up and down, rolled her eyes—and then turned her back on him and walked away. “It was not until after I had closed the Golden Gate Inn and hit the road as a single in vaudeville that I saw Miss Waters again. I went to Chicago where Clarence Muse, who was manager of the Avenue Theatre at 31st Street and Indiana Avenue, booked my act to play his house. Ethel was booked into the old Monogram Theatre, 35th and State streets. Trevy Woods and I went together to see her perform. After she finished her act, Trevy and I went backstage to say hello. To our dismay, we found a very ill Ethel. I half carried her home and attended her until her indigestion—an ailment with which she suffered through most of our association—was over. I had to leave Chicago for a few days and didn’t see Ethel until after her engagement at the Monogram ended. The Sunday night after closing her Monogram run, Miss Waters and Ethel Williams went to the Entertainers, then the South Side’s most famous café at 35th Street and Indiana Avenue. Trevy and I invited them to Trevy’s all-night spot . . . where we met and joined George White, the producer, and his star, Ann Pennington.”
Nothing had ever clicked for them in New York. “I just didn’t like97 Earl at that time. He was intelligent, a sound showman, and he knew the theater,” said Ethel. “I’d insult him every time he tried to talk to me.” But Dancer was smoother and more sophisticated now, and more persuasive. “He was a guy who had a lot of moxie. He knew where he was going. Or where he wanted to go,” recalled Lennie Bluett. Ethel saw that Dancer knew his way around the clubs, knew how to talk to showbiz folk, knew how to dress. “Very self-assured,” said Bluett. “Very dapper too. Always wore real fine clothes. Always New Yorkish with a hat with the brim pulled down at just the right angle. Like Lucius Beebe.” At this point, Ethel’s feelings about him started to change. In many respects, Dancer was different from the men who had been in her life: her first husband, Buddy, her thuggish boyfriend Rocky, and all those slick sporting men. His middle-class bearings showed, which she rather enjoyed. But, like other men in Ethel’s life, Dancer also had a hard-won street sophistication. He had a different way of looking at show business. Performing at Black clubs and theaters for colored folks was fine, but for Dancer that wasn’t quite big enough. Many venues were still closed to colored performers, but maybe they weren’t so much closed as in need of the right Negro entertainer. Ethel was precisely that kind of entertainer. In his favor was the fact that Earl Dancer also understood one or two things about women. He could pour on the charm. And he could pour on the sex. He knew how to give them that look, letting them know he thought they were hot. But then so was he. Ethel Williams may have been Waters’ partner, but that didn’t mean Waters and Williams weren’t susceptible to the seductive allure of a good-looking guy. In fact, as Dancer must have noticed, Williams was then dating the dancer Clarence Dotson. Both women remained fluid and flexible in their relationship and their sexuality. Never had either stopped seeing men. And Ethel, at least, may have had other women as well.
That night at the club proved to be a breakthrough for Dancer. Ethel had had it with her current manager, and she wasn’t satisfied with her act either. Seeing an opening, Dancer “suggested that since her contract was about up that she let me try my hand at shaping her career. Ethel appeared to like the idea, and since she had a few dates with tentative bookings I was fortunate in getting her considerably more money for these dates than she had been receiving under her other management.”
Now Dancer did everything he could to get close to Ethel—flattering her, cajoling her, joking with her, flirting with her, and ever ready to kneel before her talent. Shrewdly playing up to her growing vanity, he was willing to concede that she was a queen and he merely her adoring, willing subject. He now believed they’d be a great team together in an act. He also constantly told Waters that the colored time was not enough. She had to perform on the “white time,” had to get bookings at those important white clubs and theaters with the rich patrons on their turf. Now was the time she had to broaden her audience and make the “white time” her turf. But Ethel loved ruling the roost in Harlem and in the big colored spots of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. She would always cherish the way Negro audiences reached out to her, the way they sent those enthusiastic messages of approval and adulation through their wild applause, their laughter, their screams and shouts of joy. No white audience could ever show that kind of enthusiasm.
But Dancer stayed after her. Shrewdly, he also sought to win the approval of Pearl Wright. When Waters and company traveled to St. Louis to appear at the Booker T. Washington Theatre, something worked in his favor. Ethel Williams’ relationship with the dancer Clarence Dotson, who had carved out a successful career on the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit, had become serious. The two decided to marry in St. Louis, where Dotson was performing at the Rialto, the biggest vaudeville house in the city. For Waters, this marked an end or perhaps just a change in their relationship. Perhaps Williams believed it was the right time to embark on a new phase of her life—with a domestic arrangement that brought her a different kind of security. Often the same-sex relationships that women—and men—developed early in their careers on the road came to an end as they grew older. Ethel had turned twenty-seven in October 1923. No one can say for sure how Ethel felt, but at the wedding ceremony in late February 1924, Ethel and a friend, Jovedah De Rajah, “ ‘stood up’ with the98 couple, and after the ceremony the entire party was a guest of De Rajah at breakfast.”
Waters’ loss, of course, proved to be Dancer’s gain. Now he clearly had an opening, and Waters finally agreed to work with him onstage and also to let him manage her career. “After Ethel Williams left99,” said Dancer, “I, with the help of Miss Waters and the late Pearl Wright, one of the grandest pianists of her time, arranged our first venture together—our vaudeville act. Ethel Waters and Earl Dancer, with Pearl Wright at the piano.”
After those early years as one of the Hill Sisters, Waters had not appeared willing to share the stage with anyone save Ethel Williams. Much as she liked and relied on her accompanist Pearl Wright, Wright was precisely that: her accompanist, always remaining discreetly on the sidelines. Fletcher Henderson had learned to do that too. But Dancer persuaded her that they could be a team of sorts. Arrangements were made by Dancer that they would both be represented by the Pat Casey Theatrical Agency. The Casey people were always more interested in Ethel than Earl and urged her to drop him and perform on her own, but Ethel wouldn’t hear of it.
What indeed was the secret of Earl Dancer’s charms? Frankly, there was much about him that Ethel found hard to resist. There he was, always strutting about like a bold brillia
nt impresario in search of his empire. Pushing for the top bookings, he could talk the talk and walk the walk, and, significantly, he wasn’t afraid of white people. Nor did he kowtow. Playing submissive wasn’t his style. That Ethel had to admire. And he wasn’t afraid of her either, no matter how much she cursed him out and laid his soul to rest. That, too, Ethel had to admire. He still needed more experience under his belt. But he never let that stop him from making a deal. He loved serving as Ethel’s front man. No doubt he had hoped to do that with Cora Green until his accident. But certainly Dancer understood that Green, for all her talent, was not Ethel Waters. Now he was completely committed to seeing Waters’ talent have the platform he believed it deserved.
For Ethel, Dancer was something of a dream come true. Dancer would never let a big-time producer or club owner refer to her as a mere honky-tonk singer. Ready to work tirelessly for her, he was the ideal PR man, the ideal companion on the road, the ideal fighter for her. Still able to fight with the best of them, she didn’t hesitate to let Dancer join her in the battle, to relieve her of some of the stress and pressure so she could concentrate on her performances. Dancer also courted the Negro press, aware of its importance in further establishing Ethel’s career. Mainstream media still had little interest in her, but perhaps that would change. In the meantime, he struck up a friendship with writers like Geraldyn Dismond, who wrote long, major biographical profiles of Ethel and Dancer for the Pittsburgh Courier.
